For years now I have watched Haenir’s putrid action-horror game Blight: Survival like a miasmatic knight errant squinting through the bushes at a peasant-shaped mushroom. I reached out to the devs for an interview a couple of years ago, and received no reply. I wasn’t hugely surprised by their silence: Blight began life as a two-person project, and is a long way from release. Still, there’s been some ominous movement of late: the developers have unveiled a new biome and enemies, and are now fielding applications for very limited closed playtesting.
After many, many years of waiting, we finally have a little more information about Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Samus’ next hotly-anticipated adventure will arrive on both Switch and Switch 2 at some point this year, the latter version boasting improved visuals and access to the upcoming console’s Mouse Mode for precise aiming.
At the recent Switch 2 hands-on event in London, we were keen to put this new control scheme to the test, namely, working out how easy it is to transition from ‘standard’ analogue stick inputs to Mouse Mode. After going hands-on with an early section of Metroid Prime 4, we’re pleased to report that swapping between the two is seamless.
The developers of post-apocalyptic shooter Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl have shared a roadmap for future updates, promising new guns, smarter foes, and a helpful development kit for modders. Among the changes is good news for anyone frustrated after pumping their entire backpack of bullets into 30 to 50 feral hogs. Murderised mutants will now drop loot of some kind, instead of offering no reward at all.
I’m thankfully very remote from the capital these days, but Edwin will occasionally regale the morning meeting with dark fables about how much a pint now costs in London. He’ll stumble on to camera, his eyes bloodshot and breathing heavy, and we’ll all know he’s traded a new vital organ for a swift half. Occasionally he’ll dart his head around to the sound of banging at the door then immediately dive out of the window, and we’ll pray for his safe return after outrunning The Bad Teapot gang, who he borrowed £8000 from in 2006 for a warm plastic beaker of Carling with a dead wasp floating in it. Sounds bleak down there.
As such, I would not blame anyone south of the Severn-Wash for resorting to the stealth puzzle drink stealing antics we find in Sipssassin. You play a bald, sharply dressed sneak thief. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to never pay for another drink as long as you live. There are some nonsense lore reasons about why it’s actually good and cool that you’re half-inching everyone’s tipples but that just makes it less fun, honestly. Here’s a trailer.
If you’re thinking about getting Street Fighter 6 on the Switch 2 at launch but don’t necessarily want to commit to the entire package with both DLC updates, it seems there will be one other option.
As highlighted by Nintendo, fighters will be able to choose from the ‘Years 1-2’ edition including all 26 fighters, or you can opt with a digital standard edition – without all the extra characters and additional content.
But Bungie will consider additional hardware in the future.
Halo, Destiny and ex-Microsoft developer Bungie revealed its new extraction-shooter Marathon to the world last week and it seems there has already been some questions about the possibility of a Switch 2 release.
In case you were wondering, Japanese publication Famitsu asked about the chances of this upcoming game – due out this September – coming to Nintendo’s “next-generation game hardware” and it’s currently something the team has no plans for right now but will consider in the future.
The update includes a total of 12 tracks with a runtime of nine minutes in total. You can listen to the iconic title theme, the overworld theme, and more. Here’s the full list of tracks on offer in this latest update:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the biggest RPGs out there. While there are many iconic items and locations in the game, perhaps none comes close to the Dragonborn Helmet worn by your character. For a limited time at IGN Store, you can pre-order this brand new Dragonborn Helmet Replica from Fanattik. If you’re a huge fan of Skyrim or just looking for a new item for your gaming collection, the Dragonborn Helmet is the perfect choice!
Pre-Order The Elder Scrolls V: Skryrim Dragonborn Helmet Today at IGN Store
Fanattikis no stranger to the worlds of collectibles and replicas, with many items available at IGN Store. This Dragonborn Helmet Replica is a limited edition product, with only 5,000 units available worldwide. With The Elder Scrolls as big as it is, it’s likely that this item will sell out quickly. For many Skyrim fans, this Dragonborn Helmet should be quite familiar, as it is used by the protagonist of the game.
Thanks to the hand-painted work, there are a ton of details all over the helmet, so you can expect even details like rust to appear on this premium product. There’s a built-in stand included in the box, so you won’t have to worry about finding a way to display the helmet.
Currently, this Skyrim Dragonborn Helmet Replica is set to ship out in September 2025. Don’t miss your chance to take home this limited edition collector’s item!
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Astro Bot fans have all heard the story of the creation of the sponge power-up, but did you know developer Team Asobi also prototyped even wackier powers, like a coffee grinder and a roulette wheel?
We didn’t, until IGN attended GDC 2025, where Team Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet gave a talk simply titled, “The Making of ‘ASTRO BOT'”. In his talk, Doucet went in-depth on the process of creating the PlayStation mascot platformer, including showing off a number of early prototype images and cut content.
Doucet began his talk by talking about the initial pitch for Astro Bot, which was written in May 2021, just a few months after Team Asobi began prototyping it. According to him, there were 23 different revisions of the pitch before it was shown to top management. Their pitch was apparently initially given as an adorable comic strip showing off the main pillars and activities of the game. Clearly, it was a success.
Next, Doucet explained how the team generated ideas. The answer, unshockingly, is a lot of brainstorming, but what Team Asobi did was form small groups of 5-6 people that mix individuals from different disciplines together. Everyone wrote or drew ideas on individual sticky notes, leading to this absolutely incredible brainstorming board image:
Not every idea made it to the next phase, prototyping, Doucet said. In fact, only around 10% of their brainstorms actually got made. But that was still a lot of prototyping. Doucet went on to talk about the importance of prototyping all sorts of things, explaining that everyone on the team was encouraged to prototype ideas they had. This included departments outside of game design, such as an example where audio designers made a theater inside Astro Bot to prototype haptic controller vibrations that corresponded to different sound effects, such as the different ways a door can open and close.
Prototyping was so important to the Astro Bot team, Doucet said, that a few programmers on the team were reserved to prototype things that had nothing to do with platforming. That’s where Astro Bot’s sponge mechanic came from – they prototyped a sponge that squeezed dry using the adaptive trigger, it was fun, and it became a part of the game.
Doucet shared the above image, which included a number of such prototypes that were made, but never turned into Astro Bot mechanics, alongside those that did. You can see the balloon and sponge, which were used, alongside prototypes of what looks like a tennis game, a little walking wind-up toy, a roulette wheel, a coffee grinder, and several more.
Later in the talk, Doucet also discussed how levels were selected and designed around certain mechanics. The goal, he said, was for every level to have unique gameplay of some kind and never feel too similar to another level. While that doesn’t mean that Astro Bot could never use the same power-up on more than one level, Doucet said that the expression of it had to be different enough each time to make the level feel unique. For instance, he showed some images of a cut level themed around bird flights that was cut due to reusing Astro Bot’s monkey power-up in ways that were a bit too similar to the level Go-Go Archipelago, as well as another level in Astro’s Playroom that had a similar power.
“In the end, it was decided that the overlap was not healthy enough to create variety, and we just cut this level entirely,” he said. “We’ll never know if that level would have been popular. But in hindsight, I think it’s a good thing that we got to spend that time elsewhere.”
Finally Doucet closed the talk by talking about the game’s final scene, and yes, this is Spoilers if you haven’t finished Astro Bot yet. Read on at your own risk.
In the final scene of Astro Bot, the player reassembles a broken Astro Bot using limbs and assistance from the other gathered bots. According to Doucet, originally the player was just handed a completely dismembered Astro. No head, no limbs, just the torso. But Doucet said that this made some people “really upset”, so they went with the slightly more intact version we see in the existing game.
Doucet’s talk included a number of other interesting nuggets and tidbits about the development of Astro Bot. We’ve spoken to him in the past multiple times about the development of Astro Bot, a game that we gave a 9/10 in our review, calling it “A fantastically inventive platformer in its own right, Astro Bot is particularly special for anyone with a place in their heart for PlayStation.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the Nintendoverse, and we’re all a bit excited around these parts. Despite some bumps in the road around pricing, if you look past all the noise and the Nintendo-like messaging that can present more questions than it answers, the software looks per-itty good.
Sure, for multiplatform gamers who’ve already had their fill of Elden Rings, Cyberpunks, and Street Fighters, Switch 2’s 2025 lineup won’t hit quite the same. And although Nintendo’s own slate is fairly slim at launch, it’s managed to turn the head of an old karting curmudgeon with a launch game that has me genuinely excited — with the tingles and everything — to play a new Mario Kart, something I honestly thought was beyond me at this point.
