Presidents Day weekend is here, and tons of great deals are available for a limited time. Check out our picks for Presidents Day deals below.

Lost Soul Aside for $20

“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.

Magic: The Gathering launched its first set of 2026, Lorwyn Eclipsed, and early signs are it’s a great return to in-universe cards.

As we do regularly, we’re looking at how the latest set has affected pricing across the cardboard game we love so much, leaning on data from our friends at TCGplayer. Spoiler alert: Black and Blue cards are in vogue this season, it seems.

Climbers

Kicking off with an Elemental that makes for a nifty inclusion for upgrading the Dance of the Elementals precon, Sunderflock is a nine-cost card that gets cheaper the more Elementals you have in play.

Girls Frontline 2: Exilium recently revealed the new content that’s coming in its next patch on February 19, and there’s a lot. The headliners are two new T-Dolls, Alva and Voymastina, the latter of which is the strongest Doll in the game. Alva will arrive on February 19, and Voymastina will arrive on March 12. On top of that, there’s new story content, limited-time outfits and events, and lots of free rewards.

New T-Dolls Join the Fray

Alva, the dependable leader of Task Force DEFY, is the first new Doll to join the roster. Though reserved in demeanor, she is fiercely protective of her squad. She’s a Support-class Doll and excels at providing powerful shields and enhancing team survivability, making her a natural fit for shield-focused teams. With her signature weapon, 6P33, she increases the critical damage of Freeze-based allies and further amplifies the damage of shielded units, turning defense into offense. She synergizes particularly well with Robella, creating a 1+1>2 effect, and her arrival marks the full realization of shield-centric Freeze teams.

The new story content, called Corposant, will be released in three parts on February 19, February 26, and March 12. It features CG animations and delivers an experience comparable to a visual novel, with more than 100,000 English words. When the final chapter launches on March 12, it will also introduce the highly anticipated new Doll Voymastina, who is officially recognized as the strongest second-generation Doll in the game.

Codenamed “White Mastiff,” Voymastina is a physical-team core damage dealer who specializes in defense-ignoring capabilities, delivering massive physical damage through both active and support attacks. Her exclusive effect, Predator’s Principle, boosts burst damage, while Eye of the White Mastiff enables sustained offensive pressure. Debuting alongside her is the Elite assault rifle 6P71 (Medium Ammo), Voymastina’s imprinted signature weapon, designed to complete her combat profile and reinforce her role as a top-tier damage dealer.

Free Goodies on the Way

The patch will add lots of new free rewards, led by the ability to earn 55+ pulls, 11,000+ Collapse Pieces, an Elite Doll (Balthilde), and a Commander outfit during the themed Corposant event that launches February 19.

Plus, there are multiple upcoming log-in events that can score you additional goodies. Starting February 19, you can log in to receive 10 Targeted Access Permissions (which are used to pull for characters) and sign in to receive another 10. And another event starts March 12, where you can get an additional 10. Also starting February 19, you can get one reward mail every week, each containing one Access Permission, 100 Collapse Pieces (which can be used to get more Targeted Access Permissions), and 100 Next-Gen Memory Sticks (which can be used to increase your affinity with individual Dolls).

From February 19 to April 1, the limited-time Splash Bash event introduces a PK-style gameplay mode featuring interactive matchups between Dolls and players. There’s streamlined gameplay guidance and stage-clearing tips, making the mode a light but competitive change of pace. And you can unlock the exclusive Commander outfit Leisurely Heat by participating.

On top of all this, the upcoming patch will also add limited-time discounts on three new outfits: Alva – Antje, Lenna – Flying Phantom, and Nikketa – Night on the Silver Bay. And there will be a new permanent gameplay mode called Ashen Tales in Artifact Recovery.

As always, Girls Frontline 2: Exilium will continue to release more new content in the future. In the next six months, you can expect extensive story updates, new gameplay modes, new Dolls and outfits, and collaborations with other major IPs. If you want to stay up to date on those details and announcements, you can visit the official website or join the community on Twitter, YouTube, or Discord.

The FIFA/EAFC game franchise has been going strong for more than 30 years, and in that time it’s featured some of the most iconic players in history on the cover. But only one can be crowned the true GOAT, and now is your chance to tell us who that should be.

We’ve created a tournament presented by McDonald’s and their limited-time Hot Honey sauce. Just as these cover athletes elevated the FIFA/EAFC franchise, the Hot Honey sauce elevates your faves to a new level. The tournament will have 32 cover athletes organized into a bracket that you’ll vote on, and they cover just about the entire run of the series, from Erik Thorstvedt (FIFA Soccer 95) to Jude Bellingham and Jamal Musiala (EA FC 26).

Players will face off in 1v1 matchups, with the one who gets the most votes moving on to the next round. All the matchups in each round will be done at the same time, and voting will be conducted through polls on the bottom of the page you’re currently on as well as IGN’s Instagram stories. If you come back to this page on the dates listed below, the polls will be updated to the latest round and you can vote again.

🗓️ Voting Dates

First Round: Feb. 13

Sweet 16: Feb. 17

Elite 8: Feb. 19

Final 4: Feb. 23

Championship: Feb. 25

Winner Announced: Feb. 27

Nintendo’s upcoming Virtual Boy accessory can be used to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Super Mario Odyssey, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s been reported.

VGC has tested the new Virtual Boy headset (and its cheaper cardboard alternative) with the four games, which previously received VR modes to become compatible with Nintendo Labo VR following its launch back in 2019.

As VGC reports, the new Virtual Boy accessory works in an identical manner to Nintendo Labo VR, essentially acting as a shell with a pair of lenses for your Switch screen. (And yes, you can remove those red Virtual Boy lenses.)

Viewing the four classic Switch games in their VR modes, players are treated to a VR effect, and can look around naturally by moving their head — which is tracked by the console’s motion sensors.

Does Nintendo intend for you to use your new Virtual Boy accessory this way? It’s debatable. On the one hand, using the actual Virtual Boy accessory for this is a little difficult, since it is designed to sit on a flat surface, removing your ability to look around easily. On the other, VGC notes that Breath of the Wild’s Switch 2 upgrade retains its VR mode option, so perhaps this was the plan all along.

Nintendo will officially launch its Virtual Boy Nintendo Classics collection next week on February 17, which you’ll need a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription on either Switch or Switch 2 to access. You’ll also need a Virtual Boy ($99.99) or cardboard Virtual Boy ($24.99) accessory, sold via the My Nintendo Store.

As of next week, the Virtual Boy library will arrive with the following games:

• Galactic Pinball
• Teleroboxer
• RED ALARM
• Virtual Boy Wario Land
• 3-D Tetris
• Golf
• The Mansion of Innsmouth

Over time, Nintendo will then slowly launch more, including two games that previously never saw the light of day.

• Mario Clash
• Mario’s Tennis
• Jack Bros.
• Space Invaders Virtual Collection
• Virtual Bowling
• Vertical Force
• V-Tetris
• Zero Racers (previously unreleased)
• D-Hopper (previously unreleased)

“Would I recommend the average Nintendo fan drops $100 or even $25 to play these games? No, probably not,” IGN wrote after going face-on with the Virtual Boy accessories recently. “There are only seven of them to play at launch, and they are more enjoyable from a historical perspective than an entertainment one. You could buy seven superior indie games for 100 bucks that come in more than just one color. But if you love exploring wacky bygones from past eras and want a really cool accessory to display in your game room, you’ll probably really like the new Virtual Boy like I did.”

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

Last night’s Sony State of Play broadcast ended with an announcement and shadow drop for God of War Sons of Sparta, a side-scrolling spin-off listed as having 1-2 player support via the PlayStation Store. The only problem? Fans can’t find its two-player option.

Early reports from those who’ve paid the game’s $29.99 asking price and revisited Kratos’ origins say that his sibling Deimos only appears at certain points, there’s no two-player option in the game’s menus, and plugging in a second PS5 controller doesn’t provide extra options.

It’s an odd situation that’s led some to suspect the PlayStation Store listing is simply incorrect — as it appears to be the only firm evidence a two-player mode exists — and seek help from others online also searching for its multiplayer.

Sega has written off $200 million of its $776 million acquisition of Angry Birds maker, Rovio, stating the “profitability of [the mobile] business had fallen below the initial forecast” — corporate speak for, ‘this hasn’t made us as much money as we thought it would.’

Sega confirmed back in April 2023 plans to purchase Angry Birds developer Rovio for $776 million, with Rovio’s mobile game expertise intended to help boost Sega’s own position in the mobile market. The acquisition completed in September that same year.

Now, in its most recent financial report, Sega Sammy said that while Rovio was “a company with strong development and operational capabilities in the mobile game area, a sector with major growth potential,” the “business environment in the global mobile game market [has] rapidly changed, with multiple major titles emerging within a short period, and competition for customer acquisition [is] intensifying.” Which is why it’s now alerting shareholders of “extraordinarily losses and revision of operating results forecast.”

“Rovio found it difficult to advance its initially planned business development, and the profitability of this business has fallen below the initial forecast,” Sega admitted.

Because the “recoverable amount” related to the buyout fell “significantly” short, the company has written off $198 million (¥30.4 billion), essentially downgrading the value of Rovio to around $578 million — $200m less than it paid for it.

Rovio is just one of the companies Sega owns. It is also home to Company of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment, Two Point Campus developer Two Point Studios, and perhaps most notably, Persona developer Atlus.

And on the plus side, Sega’s tentpole Sonic series continues to impress. IGN’s Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review returned an Amazing 9/10 when it released in September 2025. “Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds fires on all cylinders with a fantastic roster, excellent courses, and lengthy list of customization options,” we wrote at the time.

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.

A developer who worked on Highguard has discussed the “hate” he received after the free-to-play shooter debuted at December’s The Game Awards, saying the game, and by extension its team, “turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement.”

Just two weeks after the free-to-play game’s January 26 launch, yesterday Wildlight let go all but a “core group of developers” despite the newly unveiled Episode 2, and despite debuting in the top 10 in weekly active users on US Steam, and the top 20 on both US PlayStation and Xbox.

Now, in a candid statement posted to X/Twitter, tech artist and rigger Josh Sobel — who was one of those let go — talked about the impact of the launch on himself and the wellbeing of the entire team.

“The day leading to The Game Awards 2025 was amongst the most exciting of my life. After 2.5yrs of passionately working on Highguard, we were ready to reveal it to the world. The future seemed bright. Everyone I knew who had any connection to the team or project had the same [positive] sentiments,” he wrote, adding that “unbiased” internal pre-reveal feedback was “quite positive,” and when it was negative, “it was constructive, and often actionable.”

“But then the trailer came out, and it was all downhill from there,” Sobel added. “Content creators love to point out the bias in folks who give positive previews after being flown out for an event, but ignore the fact that when their negative-leaning content gets 10x the engagement of the positive, they’ve got just as much incentive to lean into a disingenuous direction, whether consciously or not.

“The hate started immediately. In addition to dogpiling on the trailer, I personally came under fire due to my naïveté on Twitter, which almost all of my now-former coworkers had learned to avoid during their previous game launches,” he explained. “After setting my Twitter account to private to protect my sanity, many content creators made videos and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing millions of views and inadvertently sending hundreds of angry gamers into my replies. They laughed at me for being proud of the game, told me to get out the McDonald’s applications, and mocked me for listing having autism in my bio, which they seemed to think was evidence the game would be ‘woke trash.’ All of this was very emotionally taxing.”

Sobel acknowledged that there’s “much constructive criticism” about Highguard’s trailer, marketing, and launch, but also isn’t sure if things would’ve been any better had the game not been announced at The Game Awards.

“We were turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement, which even prominent journalists soon began to state as fact,” Sobel said. “Within minutes, it was decided: this game was dead on arrival, and creators now had free ragebait content for a month. Every one of our videos on social media got downvoted to hell. Comments sections were flooded with copy/paste meme phrases such as ‘Concord 2’ and ‘Titanfall 3 died for this.’ At launch, we received over 14k review bombs from users with less than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even finish the required tutorial.

“In discussions online about Highguard, [Sony’s troubled live-service shooter] Concord, [Riot’s recently launched] 2XKO, and such, it is often pointed out by gamers that devs like to blame gamers for their failures, and that that’s silly. As if gamers have no power. But they do. A lot of it. I’m not saying our failure is purely the fault of gamer culture and that the game would have thrived without the negative discourse, but it absolutely played a role. All products are at the whims of the consumers, and the consumers put absurd amounts of effort into slandering Highguard. And it worked.”

As a consequence of this, Sobel said many of Highguard’s hitherto independent team will “now be forced” to return to the corporate industry “many gamers accused Wildlight of being a part of.”

“If this pattern continues, all that will be left are corporations, at least in the multiplayer space. Innovation is on life support,” he added. “Even if Highguard had a rocky launch, our independent, self-published, dev-led studio full of passionate people just trying to make a fun game, with zero AI, and zero corporate oversight…deserved better than this. We deserved the bare minimum of not having our downfall be gleefully manifested.”

Sobel finished on wishing the colleagues that remain at Wildlight “the best of luck,” and thanked a slew of “incredibly supportive journalists and creators” for their “empathy, intuition, and integrity.”

“Some of the best times of my life were spent with [the techart team],” he concluded.

A number of high-profile video game developers defended Highguard following the online backlash during the game’s launch. Developers from the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian, as well as Fortnite maker Epic, have hit out at the discourse surrounding Highguard, and the internet’s capacity to “hate” on video games at launch. Developers like Cliff Bleszinski of Gears of War fame, Epic executive Mark Rein, and Larian boss Swen Vincke spoke up against, in particular, negativity from critics.

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.