…And so the thick snow feels like a sweet variant of obscuration: an invitation to go make my own footprints. The signs are blanketed to invisibility or missing entirely, though I wouldn’t know the difference in weather this insistent. But: Easy Delivery Co.‘s map is very good. And by very good, I mean it tells me slightly less than what I want to know at all times.
Little antique shop of horrors.
In 2022’s Strange Horticulture, you ran a little shop of horrors, dealing plants with an occult edge to the inhabitants of a mysterious dark town. Now, Bad Viking and Iceberg Interactive’s follow-up, Strange Antiquities, takes us back to Undermere. Again, something strange is afoot. Again, you hear residents’ problems and offer up solutions from your range. Again, there’s a cat you can pat (!) who gets startled by the shop bell.
But this time, instead of being plant-based, the solutions are antique-based. If you enjoyed the first instalment for its puzzles and sinister aura, be sure to reach for this treasure, because it’s just as fun. (Either way, the first game is worth playing.)
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
After a preview session where I was able to play the first half an hour of LEGO Voyagers, the mandatory-two-player, what-if-Hazelight-made-a-LEGO-game adventure from developer Light Brick Studios and arthouse publisher Annapurna Interactive, I wrote, “LEGO Voyagers might already be my favorite LEGO game ever.”
Keyword: might.
One less-than-ideal thing happened between my initial preview and my 14-year-old daughter and I completing the full version of LEGO Voyagers – where we tumbled, built, and played our way through to the end credits in same-screen co-op: it ended all too quickly. Though we enjoyed it the whole way through – it left us disappointingly unfulfilled because it ended just as it seemed like it should be hitting its stride.
You see, we rolled credits after just three and a half hours – even less than the slim five hours the publisher told us to expect. I’ve never been one to knock a game just for being short. Heck, Playdead’s Inside is still probably the greatest game I’ve ever personally reviewed at IGN, and it, like LEGO Voyagers, is a dialogue-free adventure that ended in less than four hours.
But while Inside left my jaw on the floor in astonishment at the incredible masterpiece I’d just experienced, LEGO Voyagers left both my and my daughter’s jaws on the floor for an entirely different reason: We both said, “Wait, that’s it?” To be fair, this is a $25 game and not everything has to be a Silksong. But it did leave both of us wanting more in a, “No really, we actually thought there’d be more than this,” kind of way.
I’m getting that gripe out of the way up front to set expectations, because outside of the all-too-soon end of the campaign, I love almost everything else about LEGO Voyagers. I’ll start with the tone, which is quite different from Traveller’s Tales’ more whimsical licensed LEGO games and the slapstick-with-heart LEGO movies. Voyagers is instead playfully curious – delightfully so – right down to who you play as and how you move. You and your co-op partner are just nameless, voiceless 1×1 bricks – one red and one blue, both with a single, mildly expressive eyeball attached to one side – and you simply roll your way around the LEGO-built world with fairly believable physics bouncing you around the play spaces. And though it obviously makes no logical sense, you can jump by pressing A (on an Xbox controller) and snap yourself onto any nearby peg with B. Pressing Y rotates your orientation by 90 degrees when you’re in that B-button snap mode.
Actually, though, your avatars are not entirely voiceless. Your 1×1 bricks can make adorable little noises if you press the X button, which can occasionally be used to harmonize in certain spots but is more likely intended to get your co-op partner’s attention when playing online. (On that note, kudos to Annapurna for following Hazelight’s lead and offering a Friend’s Pass that allows you to play with a friend online using only one copy of Voyagers.)
Our adorable 1×1 bricks instantly make for likeable protagonists in an almost Pixar-ish kind of way. I appreciate the little touches, like how the blue one starts with a beach bucket on its “head.” The music – which doesn’t always play but makes an impact when it does – plays a big part in establishing Voyagers’s playful vibe, too. It’s mellow but varied, humming along in the background in a way that’s additive rather than just being forgettable noise. Most, if not all of it, would go on your “Chill” or yoga playlist and not anywhere else, but it totally works here.
I also want to commend the authentic art direction and visual identity of Voyagers, which is decidedly less cartoony compared to the licensed LEGO games. It goes for a sort-of realism, with every piece in the diorama-like worlds looking like the shiny plastic its real-life counterpart is – complete with the LEGO wordmark stamped into every brick. The soft daytime lighting baked into many scenes has a warmth and serenity to it that gives it a relaxing, mellow, and playfully curious tone, and the use of light and shadow helped draw me in immediately. That these sets sometimes have water flowing through them or surrounding them only adds to the believability of these being actually constructed LEGO sets that you’re observing from above as an omniscient participant.
Furthering that easy-going atmosphere is the complete and total lack of any penalty for death whatsoever; when – not if – you tumble off the edge of a scene or miss a jump and plunge off the side, you’ll instantly reappear right where you last were prior to your mistake. It’s completely low stakes and encourages goofing off, so when you snap yourself onto your co-op partner and roll both of you off a ledge, or fling them off a bridge you’re supposed to be holding down for them to cross, they can’t even be too mad about it until the fifth or sixth time you pull the same trick.
There’s never any direction given, but intuitively we immediately understood that your goal in a game like this is to get from point A to point B. In the early part of the campaign, that’s accomplished by simply picking up loose bricks from around the scene and working together to assemble them into makeshift bridges to cross gaps. In true LEGO spirit, there’s no single right way to build your path forward: You could build a super-clean structure that a civil engineer would approve of, or cobble together a hodgepodge of pieces with no regard for aesthetics or efficiency but which gets the job done nonetheless. We tended toward the latter, and had a great time doing it. (Side note: a Photo Mode would’ve been a nice addition as a way to capture the digital memory of what you create and share it with friends and family – and the act of working together to solve whatever obstacle is in front of you is really enjoyable. But simple screenshots sufficed.)
Those puzzles ramp up a bit as the campaign progresses, though as I mentioned it felt like there’s a lot more room for it to grow into that it leaves unexplored. A favorite scene of ours had us driving a big dump truck of sorts around an industrial yard where train tracks are made. The locomotive we rode in on had to stop due to a gap in the tracks, so we got out, hopped in the truck with one of us steering while the other (effectively) worked the pedals. We roamed around, collecting raw materials into the truck bed before taking them to the foundry to be forged into usable track pieces, then satisfyingly snapped the new track into place and continued onwards. It’s still simple, but with a few more steps involved than just assembling a bridge or stairway.
We also had fun with a series of minigames near the end of the story that I won’t spoil here, except to note that they’re particularly finicky physics-based challenges that might be quite tricky for younger gamers that are likely to be drawn to Voyagers and its E-for-Everyone ESRB rating. Fortunately, none of these tricky tasks are required in order to progress – but we did have fun earning the Achievements that came along with completing them.
Though puzzles make up the meat of the gameplay, there’s also a bit of freedom to play around in many scenes. My daughter and I found ourselves racing to be the first to “pop” every flower we came across by rolling over it (and there are a ton of them throughout the entire campaign) even though there are no actual rewards for doing so. There are also fun little “breaks” you can take, such as by each hopping on a teeter-totter or sitting next to each other on a bench. They’re absolutely not required, but they make for fun little pit stops along the golden path (and another idea that those of us who played Split Fiction earlier this year might recognize).
If I were to levy one more complaint against LEGO Voyagers, it’s that neither my daughter nor myself quite got what the meaning of the completely wordless story was supposed to be. In the opening moments, the 1×1 brick avatars watch a rocket launch go awry. They spend the next handful of hours trying to get to the rocket facility…and I suppose you’ll see what happens. But if there was a moral to the tale here in the way you might expect from watching Wall-E or playing a game like Tunic, both of us missed it.
Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy Movie announcement has sent fans rushing back to the first Mario film, and a teasing scene that appears to set up the freshly-announced sequel.
This scene, coupled with the fact Nintendo looks likely to adapt the plot of the Mario Galaxy video game, has prompted fan speculation that we’re about to see a major piece of Super Mario lore confirmed, following decades of debate.
Super Mario Galaxy centers on the character of Rosalina, a space princess that Nintendo itself has said shares similarities with Princess Peach. Within the first Galaxy game, Rosalina’s backstory is revealed through pages of a storybook, with her journey through the stars explained as her searching for her long-lost parents.
Rosalina’s parentage is kept vague, with her mother pictured but kept largely obscured. But Nintendo is said to have once planned a more concrete backstory that linked Rosalina and the Mushroom Kingdom, with her being related to Princess Peach in some way.
Years later, eagle-eyed fans spotted a mysterious tease within 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie, in a scene which sees Peach discuss her origins, and reveal how she first arrived in the Mushroom Kingdom.
“You don’t seem like you’re from here,” Mario says.
“I don’t know where I’m from,” Peach replies. “My earliest memory is arriving,” she continues, as a flashback shows her, aged as a toddler, turning up in the Mushroom Kingdom via a warp pipe. Dressed in a skirt decorated with stars and moons, she is quickly found by a group of Toads. “I was so lucky they found me. They took me in, raised me like one of their own, and when I was ready they made me their princess.”
“Maybe you’re from my world?” Mario suggests, though Peach seems to disagree.
“There’s a huge universe out there, with a lot of galaxies,” she hints, as the camera pulls back to focus on the night sky.
This is a moment some fans believe is a nod towards Peach’s own galactic origins — and with it, the link between her and Rosalina that Nintendo ultimately shied away from confirming long ago.
Mario games are not known for their story, and Super Mario Galaxy’s director Yoshiaki Koizumi has admitted he wrote Galaxy’s storybook in secret each evening, after other developers had left the office. Ultimately, he surprised even Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto with the idea, and an adapted version of his plans was ultimately included.
Without further detail on that link between the two characters, and with Nintendo seemingly keen to keep things vague, fans have been left to debate whether Peach might have once been planned as Rosalina’s mother (or even the other way around), or alternatively if the pair were intended as siblings.
Has Nintendo now softened its stance on keeping Rosalina’s story a secret? Last week’s Nintendo Direct also provided some clues. Koizumi and Miyamoto both appeared, with the former announcing a physical version of Galaxy’s storybook as a tie-in product, and that additional storybook pages would be included for the first time in the Switch 2 re-releases of Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2.
With the Super Mario Galaxy Movie headed into space next year, fans may finally get some answers.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Oh, Netflix’s The Witcher TV series is back with its fourth series next month, following a lengthy hiatus that’s seen Geralt regenerate from Henry Cavill into Liam Hemsworth. The new series premieres in late October, and first official looks at both the HemsGerry and Laurence Fishburne as Blood and Wine vampire Regis have been offered.
Hang on a minute, I thought, when I scrolled past this news on one of the screens in my Adrian Veidt-esque world-watching setup – Laurence Fishburne’s in it? Yep, it seems that after not getting around to watching the third series, I’ve managed to completely blot out all knowledge that the actor behind The Matrix’s pill distributor is being cast in The Witcher.
Gearbox has confirmed it’s “exploring” how to add a field of view (FOV) slider to Borderlands 4 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S after complaints from console players.
When Borderlands 4 launched last week, console players were shocked to discover not only a lack of a FOV slider in-game, but no motion blur toggle, either. The PC version of Borderlands 4 has settings for both.
The lack of a FOV slider is the biggest issue right now with Borderlands 4 on console, if anecdotal evidence across the internet is anything to go by, with some complaining that not being able to tweak the FOV value is causing them to experience motion sickness.
Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford responded to the complaints to suggest fairness might have something to do with the lack of a FOV slider, although all that comment did was confuse fans given the PC version has it and there’s crossplay at launch.
Now, Gearbox has confirmed it’s working on the problem, saying in a statement published on social media:
“Vault Hunters! We have heard your feedback on FOV (Field of View) sliders on console. The team is currently exploring how to bring these sliders to both Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 versions. We will continue to read your feedback and prioritize game updates with your experience in mind. Thanks all!”
There are suggestions the console version of Borderlands 4 lacks a FOV slider in order to maintain certain performance levels. By increasing the FOV, you’re putting the hardware under more strain and potentially impacting things like framerate.
Whatever the issue, Borderlands 4 got off to a big start on Steam, where it hit just over 300,000 concurrent player numbers on Sunday. No other Borderlands game has come close to that in terms of concurrent player numbers on Valve’s platform. The true number will of course be much higher when you add console players.
While Borderlands 4 got off to a big start in terms of player numbers, it’s not entirely plain sailing for Gearbox. The release was marred by complaints about PC performance that have resulted in a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam. Gearbox has issued an update to address the PC version of Borderlands 4 specifically, although without patch notes.
If you are delving into Borderlands 4 don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
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.
Some weeks, finding new games for the Maw is like scouring a village of octogenarians for the last remaining virgin to throw into a rumbling volcano. You awkwardly pop the question during a dozen hastily organised afternoon tea dates, and riffle through family trees in desperation as the air thickens with sulphur.
This week, it’s like the mountainside has been invaded by a horde of teenage firebugs. Stop shoving! Form an orderly queue! You are going to give the volcano constipation. Here’s a moderately curated round-up of the most promising specimens. May they burn brightly and stave off the magma for at least another seven days.
Not long to go.
The latest UK charts data is in and the newly-released Borderlands 4 has performed admirably, hitting the number 1 spot ahead of both Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza.
Of course, we still have a couple more weeks or so to wait until the Switch 2 release, with Borderlands 4 scheduled to launch on 3rd October on Nintendo’s new console. It’s difficult to say whether this early momentum spells good news for the Switch 2 release, but we’d wager the game probably won’t sell half as much as it has on the PS5 (which commands 80% of the platform split).
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The Final Fantasy series’ iconic victory fanfare has been a staple feature for the majority of the long-running RPG franchise since the very first entry in 1987. However, series composer Nobuo Uematsu recently revealed that a music programmer’s accidental discovery was what enabled him to give Final Fantasy’s battle themes and fanfare a truly punchy, driving drumbeat for the very first time.
At a recent sold-out event reported on by GameWatch, Uematsu talked in detail about Final Fantasy III’s score and its development. With a soundtrack that incorporated a wider variety of tunes including comical pieces, Uematsu credits Final Fantasy III as a turning point in which he established his approach to composing music for RPGs.
Uematsu emphasized that there was a stark difference in Final Fantasy III’s music quality compared to Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II, even though they were composed using the same equipment and for the same console (the Famicom / NES). Although most games only used four of the NES’s audio channels, Uematsu revealed that Final Fantasy III made heavy use of a particular drum sound on the fifth channel, which was discovered completely by accident during development.
Uematsu recalls that the game’s music programmer Hiroshi Nakamura came to him one day with a kick drum-like sound he had discovered. Uematsu was very excited to make use of this. Although the NES’s “white noise” channel could be used for hi-hat and snare drum-like percussion effects, this kick drum sound provided exactly what Uematsu had been looking for to add a more driving rhythm to battle themes.
However, Nakamura expressed misgivings, concerned that it may cause issues with the game. Uematsu explained: “The programmers back then were afraid of bugs and so they didn’t want to play that kick drum sound,” adding that he reassured them that he would stop using the kick drum sound if it caused problems.
Fortunately, no such issues occurred. Uematsu successfully used this drum sound to create a punchier version of the fanfare, as well as to add a driving drum beat to battle themes. He particularly highlighted how important Nakamura’s kick drum was to Final Fantasy III’s ‘This is the Last Battle,’ and proudly observed that the first four bars “still have a rich sound even today.”
Even 35 years on, Uematsu said that he still really wants to know exactly how Nakamura came across the drum sound, but apparently the music programmer no longer remembers. Uematsu joked that “he must have had his memory erased by aliens.”
The NES had only five audio channels. The “pulse wave” channels 1 and 2 were the main ones used for melodies, “triangle wave” channel 3 was often used for basslines, and channel 4 was for “white noise.” Channel 5 was for PCM samples (which could be used for comparatively higher quality sounds, such as voice samples). “I didn’t know about that fifth channel (at the time),” revealed Uematsu, adding that such samples took up a lot of memory so “hardly anyone used it.”
According to Uematsu, he asked a younger colleague for their opinion on how the sound was created. “I wasn’t an engineer back then so I don’t know the details, but I think they were definitely doing something with the PCM channel,” they supplied, surmising that if Final Fantasy III’s devs were able to produce the drum sound without using imported waveform data, they may have cleverly utilized the PCM channel’s on/off function. The act of switching the channel on and off might have been used to produce this sound without using up limited memory. However, this will remain a mystery until someone who actually worked on the game reveals exactly how it was done (if anyone remembers).
Uematsu credits Hiroshi Nakamura’s involvement in Final Fantasy III for helping him to shape his ideas into music and convincing him that incorporating varied types of music (such as comical pieces) made RPG soundtracks more interesting.
Photo by David Wolff – Patrick/Redferns via Getty Images.
Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.
Borderlands 4 developers Gearbox have chucked more wrenches at the shooter‘s PC performance over the weekend, following issues that’ve landed it mixed Steam review fortunes since launch last week. However, if you’re looking for patch notes, you’re gonna be a bit disappointed. Ah well, at least there are essay-length Randy Pitchford Twitter threads to scroll through if you’re partial to someone waffling about how the game runs.
