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Developers at Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash and Possessor(s) studio Heart Machine are unionising. They’ve signed up with a local branch of the Communications Workers of America, in a “wall-to-wall unit [that] represents all frontline employees”. This comes in the wake of layoffs, and takes inspiration from larger unionisation drives at megacorps like Microsoft.
Last year, Microsoft finally put some effort into making Windows 11 less dreadful for handheld PCs, launching Xbox Full Screen Experience – a stripped-back, more gamepad-friendly interface specifically for launching and installing games – on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally family. The same update has been strangely unforthcoming to other Steam Deck rivals, but it sounds like the Lenovo Legion Go series is finally getting access soon. There’s a preview build that Legion Go, Legion Go S, and Legion Go 2 owners can try right now, too.
When Emil Pagliarulo was growing up in South Boston, he lived in fear of Whitey Bulger: a local crime boss who had been shaped not only by street gangs but Alcatraz, and a stint in the CIA’s mind control program, MKUltra.
“He was basically the boogeyman,” Pagliarulo says. “He was the evil bad guy. You didn’t know where he was or even what he looked like, but you knew he was out there. I’m 10 years old, and I know this name.”
Decades later, as Bethesda Game Studios shifted into full production on Fallout 4, Pagliarulo drew on those memories to bring a post-apocalyptic Boston to life. “The game was missing something, as far as one of the overall themes,” he says. “I remember having a conversation with Todd Howard that there should be this overriding sense of paranoia that people have, and they don’t know who to trust.”
Valve have reworded a Steam blog post after its original, unsure-sounding text left open the possibility of further long-term delays to the new Steam Machine. The 2025 Year in Review article only briefly touches on the Machine, as well as the upcoming Steam Controller redesign and the Steam Frame VR headset, but its previous phrasing of “We hope to ship in 2026” – accompanied by a reminder of ongoing and widespread memory shortages – did have the kind of noncommittal yeah-we’ll-seeism that one might apply when responding to an unwanted dinner party invitation. The grim possibility of another delay, this time into 2027, hung heavy.
Now, however, that passage has been replaced with a more confident and definitive commitment to a 2026 release. “We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages,” Valve’s update reads, “but we will be shipping all three products this year.”
Slay The Spire 2 launched into early access last week to the tune of over half a million Steam concurrents, which isn’t too shabby for a game with placeholder art that looks like it was knocked up in MS Paint. I played a couple runs of the roguelike deckbuilder this weekend, and experienced such positive emotions as Wait, Doesn’t This Basically Break The Game? Delightfully Devilish, Seymour and Oh, I Forgot I Had That Potion.
I wouldn’t say I’m bowled over, mind. The original Slay The Spire precipitated a Cambrian explosion of roguelite or roguelike deckbuilders. The sequel has to stand apart from both its predecessor and from all the games Spire has in-Spired, like Monster Train. While not without precedent, the co-op functionality could be its silver bullet. So it’s just as well that the game’s first round of patches are targetting problems with multiplayer.
Marvel Rivals developers NetEase have introduced new systems for detecting thrown matches. This follows a bizarre wave of people getting bribed to take a fall, instigated by a third-party website who are now advertising themselves as some kind of community advocacy initiative.
To be cringe is to be free. I stand by this saying! The moment you unshackle yourself from the notion that something is embarrassing simply for existing, you will have a much easier time enjoying things. However. I do think I will be a bit embarrassed telling you about Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart, a dungeon crawler where you are a useless failgirl who flirts with and subsequently recruits monster girls to do all her battles, because oh my gods why would you call a game Rizz Dungeon.
Do all roads lead to gacha? It feels like an inevitability, the endpoint of the universe. When there is nothing but a handful of atoms left, the rolls will keep on coming. It’s destiny! That’s the only explanation I have for Wikipedia Gacha, a simple browser game that truly is what it says on the tin. Let me explain it for you anyway.
Menace, the latest very XCOM-ish game from Battle Brothers developer Overhype Studios, has been out in early access for about a month now, and with that the arrival of a roadmap has appeared to grace us with very sparse details regarding what you can expect in the game’s numerous updates to come.
Upon Marathon‘s launch earlier this week, Bungie revealed a pair of in-game currencies that you have to use to unlock various bits. One is called SILK, which you can earn through play and is used to unlock rewards in rewards passes. The other is LUX, a premium currency you have to spend real, cold, hard cash on to get, though its sole purpose is for cosmetics. However, much like all in-game currencies that cost real-world money, the amount you can buy and the amount it costs to buy cosmetics didn’t line up, leading to a good bit of pushback that has resulted in Bungie simply giving you more bang for your buck.
