Pokémon developer Game Freak has reportedly suffered a significant hack resulting in the leak of stolen data that includes codenames for 10th generation Pokémon games and even the Nintendo Switch 2.
As reported by Nintendo Life, data leaked includes the codename of Nintendo’s next-gen console (reportedly “Ounce”), the codename of the unannounced 10th generation Pokémon game (reportedly “Gaia”), and the codename of the announced Pokemon Legends: Z-A (“Ikkaku”).
Neither Nintendo nor The Pokémon Company have issued a statement on the leaks. IGN has asked both for a comment.
The codenames for two versions of the 10th generation Pokémon game are part of the leak (“K” and “N”), which may relate to Nintendo’s intention to release it for both the Switch and its successor as a cross-gen title. According to Nintendo Life, “Ounce” is mentioned as the target platform.
A Pokémon game codenamed “Synapse” is also reportedly mentioned. This unannounced game is said to be co-developed with another studio, with some claiming it is some sort of Pokémon MMO.
Elsewhere, source code for DS titles Pokémon HeartGold, SoulSilver,Black 2, and White 2 have reportedly leaked, resulting in stolen unused assets for Pokémon and even game music emerging online.
This Pokémon leak rekindles memories of the infamous Nintendo ‘gigaleak’ of 2020, which revealed previously unknown canceled games, prototypes, source code, development tools, and internal communication as part of what was at the time the largest leak of internal video game information ever released.
Fans are set for one of the longest breaks between major Pokémon releases in the franchise’s history. With no mainline entries releasing this year, nor any news of a remake, the Pokémon Trading Card Game on mobile will be the biggest series release in 2024.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Source code, Switch 2 details, Legends Z-A info & more.
Pokémon developer Game Freak has apparently been hacked and it’s seemingly resulted in a large amount of data – from source code to future project details – leaking online.
The explosive fast-paced action platformer Antonblast was meant to be arriving on the Switch eShop next month, but it’s now been delayed due to Hurricane Helene and Milton.
According to Summitsphere studio head and Antonblast director Tony Grayson, the hurricanes have “directly and indirectly” impacted multiple team members, which have their “roots planed across the southeaster United States”. Fortunately, everyone is safe.
“Studio Ghibli” is a genre of game, in the same way “Aliens” and “Blade Runner” are genres of game. Blue skies, wind rustling grass that’s a just-so shade of green, a preoccupation with flight? Welcome to Ghibli town, friend.
You’ll find all of the above and several other familiar pieces of iconography in Europa, a puzzle and story-led adventure that’s out now.
Thronefall is a pleasant, minimalist mashup of tower defence and strategy, in which you build up a base during the day then defend it from monstrous hordes at night. It launched in Early Access in August last year and has been wooing people with its cool colour palette ever since. Now it’s hit 1.0.
Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I’ve covered so far, check out the previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section.
Metroid-like games and their roguelike off-shoots are everywhere today. Not a week goes by without an indie game announcement promising “metroidvania” gameplay elements – and even Nintendo returned to making new Metroid titles after a near six year hiatus following Metroid: Other M in 2010. And that’s me being generous and counting Metroid Prime: Federation Force as a Metroid game…
But it wasn’t always so. After a Metroid renaissance in the early 2000s with Fusion, Prime, and Zero Mission (what a run!) exploring the series in both 2D and 3D, there was a clear shift away from these classic side-view explorative shooters. Konami stuck it out longer with the “vania” part of the equation and cranked out several quality 2D Castlevanias. But despite the critical success of many of these games, I think it’s fair to say that the genre was diminishing.
So it was with much excitement that I read on IGN back then that designer Donald Mustard and the ChAIR Entertainment team were planning to make a game based on Orson Scott Card’s dystopian novel, Empire. The two had previously collaborated on the underrated Advent Rising, and early coverage on IGN in 2006 – including whispers that it was going to be a bit of a love letter to Metroid – sounded promising.
When Metroidvanias Roamed the Earth
“The 2D Metroid and Zelda games were some of my favorite games of all time and to me represented the pinnacle of 2D game design, specifically when it comes to making a non-linear ‘onion layer’ world where exploration and discovery is the core design pillar,” Donald Mustard, former CCO, Epic Games and Co-Founder of ChAIR told me last week.
“…mostly, we had some awesome and innovative ideas and I just wanted to make it and play it.” – Donald Mustard
“Our team felt like the genre had been largely abandoned for over a decade, since the advent of 3D gaming, and we really missed playing them. We thought maybe other people missed them as well, or that even a whole new generation of gamers could discover them. I know it’s weird to consider now, but it was also a time when non-physical – aka digital – distribution was ‘just’ becoming viable and games were no longer limited to being put in a box on a store shelf at a cost of $60 or more. It felt like the possibility of what a game ‘had’ to be was ripe for disruption, and it was the perfect moment to try and do something unique. But mostly, we had some awesome and innovative ideas and I just wanted to make it and play it.”
Selecting a genre other than first-person shooter or RPG already meant swimming against the current, but releasing Shadow Complex as a digital exclusive in 2009 made it an even bigger wager. At the time, console gamers vocally defended their preference to buy physical media over digital downloads.
While it cut down on the publisher’s gamble with a non-franchise, niche game potentially gathering dust on store shelves, a digital-only release also risked alienating its potential core fanbase. Luckily, Shadow Complex made a great first showing. The polygonal, 2.5D presentation avoided the game looking like a relic of a bygone era. For ChAIR, going with polygons over sprites was all part of wanting to push the classic 2D Metroidvania formula as far as they could – and that included advanced lighting and effects.
Shadow Complex is at its core a side-scrolling action-adventure that’s heavy on exploration and platforming, but there are moments where it swings the camera around for third-person action sequences and lets players fire into the background. In a bit of serendipity, perhaps, that approach found its way into the very series that inspired Shadow Complex. The Team Ninja-developed Metroid: Other M similarly mixed 2D sequences with third-person perspective interaction – to its detriment, I’d argue in that case, as it was also tied to a clumsy control scheme.
Colonel Mustard, in the Lab, With the Foam Gun
One my favorite things about every new Zelda, Mario, or Metroid game is to discover what new powers the designers came up with. Being able to unlock, say, a magical vacuum cleaner, and then figuring out how to use it to solve puzzles is the sort of hook that has me coming back for more time and time again. I just 100-percented Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom this week – and while it didn’t quite live up to the peak combat and dungeon design of the best Zelda games past, it takes and runs with the “multi-use tool” concept in impressive ways. Whether it’s grabbing a water-based enemy to put out flames or building stairways out of beds, getting creative with objects that unlock exploration is half the fun in action-adventure games. Which brings me back to one example of why Shadow Complex stuck with me for so long: the Foam Gun.
Turns out, Mustard is also on Team Foam Gun: “I love the Foam Gun too! One of the things that most Metroid games have is a freeze mechanic you can use to freeze enemies in place. You can then use the frozen enemy as a platform to land on or jump off. We loved that mechanic and wanted to extend on the idea – what if you could use a ‘quick hardening Foam’ to ‘freeze’ an enemy or an object but then could stack Foam to build structures or walls or platforms, and then go further and add combinatorial effects like ‘what happens if I shoot foam onto something and then throw a grenade into it?’ We wanted to allow for more emergent and unexpected forms of gameplay. The more we prototyped and played with it, the more exciting it became, and the more we leaned into it as a core mechanic. That kind of philosophy and design heavily influences everything I’ve made since then.”
The Foam Gun wasn’t just fun to use. It also became an integral way to sequence-break Shadow Complex. At a runtime between five and 13 hours, according to HowLongtoBeat, the ability to create yourself your own platforms provided those who knew where to look a way to blaze through the game even faster. There is a moment in Metroid Fusion where the game sort of breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge when a player creatively “breaks” the game and gets to an area in record time. It’s a fascinating bit of meta commentary because it reminds players that for as smart and crafty as they think they are, the designers were actually one step ahead after all. They didn’t just figure out the same trick, they may have designed it in the first place.
“I love emergent gameplay, and rewarding players for trying to push the edges of what the game world or a game system can be. As we discovered crazy sequence-breaking opportunities, we decided to lean into them as opposed to ‘fixing them’ as much as possible,” Mustard told me when asked about the Foam Gun shortcuts. “We were very lucky to have Ken Lobb at Microsoft Games give us some incredible advice. It was great working with him. He was part of Nintendo when the original Metroid games were being made and shared some techniques they used to deliberately allow people to find ways to sequence break very very early into the game. It’s a design lesson I’ll never forget. Cough. Fortnite Rocket Riding. Cough. Cough.”
When Shadow Complex released in August of 2009, the reception was unanimously favorable. Not only did players love the game, it brought back fond memories of an increasingly underserved genre.
Naturally, ChAIR started work on a sequel. Mustard: “Finishing the game almost felt like ‘okay now we actually know how to make a game like this’ so now we can be much more ambitious with the next one. Our goal can be to really move the genre forward!”
Mobile Killed the Console Star
While not much is known about the actual project, designers at ChAIR and its parent company, Epic Games, acknowledge that they were working on a Shadow Complex sequel. As late as September 2011, Cliff Bleszinski (then Epic Games design director) commented that Shadow Complex 2 was “largely designed” and that Epic needed to find a partner to help finish the game and publish it. But sometimes, better – or perhaps, bigger – is the enemy of the good – and a pioneering mobile game hit led ChAIR into a new direction.
“We immediately began working on a sequel. Like with Shadow Complex, we designed the entire game map on paper first, then quickly stood it up in a very rough but completely playable form. We got pretty far into preproduction, and in my opinion, it probably would have been the best game I’ve ever made,” Mustard shared. “But… in late July of 2010 we had a very unique opportunity to partner with Apple to make the very first game ever using Unreal Engine on mobile devices. We decided to pause development on SC2 to investigate that opportunity and 4 1/2 months later released Infinity Blade on iOS.”
“Shadow Complex 2 probably would have been the best game I’ve ever made” – Donald Mustard
Infinity Blade blew up – in part because it showed core gamers that mobile games could be for them – and was quickly followed by a sequel. The two games grossed over $30 million at a time when established publishers and developers alike were still trying to figure out a “there” for them on Apple’s expanding mobile gaming marketplace. Infinity Blade III was unveiled in late 2013 and launched at the same time, complete with an Imagine Dragons song tie-in. It rocketed to #1 in the App Store within hours. But there was an even bigger distraction on the horizon that made a return to the world of Shadow Complex very unlikely.
Mustard says that creating Shadow Complex was one of the great joys of his life. The team’s goal was to see if they could make something that would live up to the games that inspired it – and then expand upon them and help bring something new to the genre.
“The right timing to return to Shadow Complex just never presented itself as we soon became very busy with what became Fortnite,” said Mustard.
I’ve Seen the Future and it Will Be
As for the future, Mustard left Epic in 2023 to join the Russo Brothers, the directors of Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, at multimedia studio AGBO. “I am very satisfied with the work I’ve done in games over the past 20+ years and for now I feel like I have done everything I wanted to do — with one possible exception,” he told me.
The good news for fans of metroidvanias – including Mustard who calls out this year’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Animal Well as new favorites (I agree!) – is that the genre is now clearly here to stay. Gone are the days of having to pick between the two flavors “sci-fi” and “gothic” bounty hunter or having to wonder if Metroid: Dread would ever see the light of day. We now have granddaddy Castlevania crossing back into the very roguelike spin-off it inspired in the first place, Dead Cells. We have forgotten Atari 2600 shooter Yars’ Revenge serving as the inspiration for a 2D metroidvania reboot in Yars Rising. And we even have the absolutely delightful shmuptroidvania Minishoot’ Adventures that basically crosses The Legend of Zelda with Galaga. If you want to play a metroidvania, you no longer have to dig in the past. I know, ironic – because that’s what this very column is about.
But I’m greedy, so I asked Donald Mustard if he would come back to work on a game like Shadow Complex – or if he was ready to deputize someone else out there who could carry on the legacy and continue the series.
“The opportunity to become a partner at AGBO with Joe and Anthony Russo and the absolutely incredible team that has assembled there is a dream come true for me. We are creating some truly incredible stories that will allow us to push storytelling further across different mediums. I can’t wait for people to experience some of these things,” he said.
“But that ‘possible exception’ I mentioned? If I was to ever direct another video game someday, it would absolutely be a game like Shadow Complex.”
“If I was to ever direct another video game someday, it would absolutely be a game like Shadow Complex.” – Donald Mustard
Where Can You Play it Now
Shadow Complex wasn’t entirely forgotten after ChAIR turned to Infinity Blade. The developer brought back a Remaster of Shadow Complex for an encore outing in 2015 for PC, with a console release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the following year.
If there is a silver lining in the story of a potential game series cut short, it’s that Shadow Complex is easy to track down – and it still holds up well in both editions. The Remaster is available for $15 on the Epic Games Store and Steam and the PlayStation and Xbox Stores. Annoyingly, the original Xbox 360 game sells for the same price. If you want to splurge, there’s even a small physical release of 7,500 PS4 copies of the Remastered version, courtesy of Limited Run, which unfortunuately now commands upwards of $100 on eBay. The remaster is definitely the version to play – and I highly recommend going back to it if you’re a fan of metroidvanias in general.
Peer Schneider heads up Game Help & Tools across IGN, Map Genie, Eurogamer, RockPaperShotgun, and VG247 and would love to fill a pool with metroidvanias and go swimming in it.
Modern survival horror games looking to recapture the aesthetics and essence of classic titles from the ‘90s often make one fatal mistake. You see, when fans who were around to play Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark: A New Nightmare on the PS1 look back, they do so with a level of fondness that, frankly, makes the games sound like the best things since sliced bread.
The truth, however, is that the earliest survival horror titles, with their awkward controls and fixed camera angles, haven’t aged particularly well; heck, there’s a reason so many of them are getting modern remakes. Veterans will forever adore them (this writer included), but newcomers often come away wondering what all the fuss was about.
Katsura Hashino knows exactly what he wants when it comes to video games. The legendary game director, who is responsible for the modern Persona games and more recently Metaphor: ReFantazio, believes that, in a world obsessed with pixel count and frame-rates, only one thing matters: the people who made it.
“I want something – even if it’s not complete, even if it’s really rough, even if it’s something really unfinished – to give me a glimpse of the humanity behind it. [I want to know] who created it and for it to give me a glimpse of the emotion that inspired it,” he explains.
It’s a philosophy that has served him well over the past 30 years and it’s one of the reasons the Persona games have such a devout following. Yes, the art direction is impeccable, as is the attention to detail, even down to the UI, but it’s the characters who populate this fantastical series that really make a difference. Chie, Junpei, Ann… They all feel like real people, with traits and emotions we can relate to, so much so they feel like old friends rather than characters from a video game. That’s entirely intentional and it’s what drives Hashino to make games – a personal approach that runs counter to some of the bigger projects out there that are required to meet the expectations of both fans and company shareholders alike.
I want something – even if it’s not complete, even if it’s really rough, even if it’s something really unfinished – to give me a glimpse of the humanity behind it.
Hashino is a longtime director at Atlus, having worked on several of the company’s Shin Megami Tensei games, the much-loved RPG series that merges the occult with more grounded settings. In a world dominated by ‘traditional’ Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, they’re a sort of goth alternative that has steadily grown in popularity over the years.
He took over the Persona series starting with Persona 3, following the departure of the previous Persona director Kouji Okada. Hashino brought over some of the darker themes from Shin Megami Tensei and mixed them with Persona’s more stylish pop vibe, resulting in a vibrant anime-influenced aesthetic, set against a high school backdrop that grappled with mythic ideas like gods and demons, as well as psychology. It’s a series that has established Hashino as one of gaming’s most respected directors. On the eve of his latest game, Metaphor: ReFantazio, IGN sat down with Hashino to look back at his past work and what drives him to make games.
Persona 3 catapulted the series into mass popularity and coincided with a renewed interest in anime in North America. However, despite its cartoon visuals there’s a lot of depth to the game and, importantly, the characters, as Hashino explains: “I think the gap between the kind of realism of the characters themselves and the anime aesthetic is a really interesting and important part of the game. You might first look and see these very anime-style characters and this anime-style world, but then might be surprised and interested to see there’s a very real [world] underpinning to them. Looking beyond the anime and seeing the realism is really a wonderful part of our games.”
I feel like if you have these super highly polished games that look like they were designed by a bunch of people in a CEO boardroom, that doesn’t really excited me
This realism – the effort Hashino and his team goes to, to ensure every character feels real – is what drives every decision in the design process, from broad ideas to specific dialogue, as Hasino explains: “There’s this little girl named Nanako [in Persona 4] who’s in elementary school. When we were first writing her dialogue, we wrote [it] to be really, really cute. But then we took a step back and thought, ‘Wait a minute, all of her lines are so cute and they’re so well done that it doesn’t feel like any actual human girl would [talk like that] at that age’. It just felt like too much.”
Rather than lean into the fact Nanako is a video game character and thus might have dialogue that doesn’t sound truly authentic, Hashino and his team went back to the writers’ room. “We started cutting back on those overly cutesy dialogues and tried to root it in reality instead. So even though Persona 4 is a modern fantasy game, we wanted it to feel closer to something that could be happening next door to you.”
One thing that becomes clear when speaking with Hashino is the love he has for the well-being of the characters in his games. When discussing his favorite moment in Persona 5, he tells us it’s when the cast of characters are able to hang out in the retro-style cafe in Shibuya that the Phantom Thieves make their hideout.
“In Persona 5, a lot of the characters don’t really have a place where they feel safe,” Hashino explains. “So I wanted to find a place where they can go and just really have that sense of security. And in Shibuya [a neighborhood in Tokyo] it’s really hard to find that location. There’s lots of roads, lots of corridors, but there’s not really a place where [you think], ‘Okay, you guys can just sit here and chill out and just use it as your base’. Finding a place [where] they’d be welcome is really difficult. So for the characters in Persona 5, I was trying to give them a place where they would be welcome. That’s when I came up with the idea of what we call in Japan a junkissa, which is an old-style cafe.”
Unsurprisingly, Hashino’s love for the characters he creates is something that’s echoed by fans, and even though Metaphor: ReFantazio steps away from the familiar Persona setting – it’s set in a new, fantasy world rather than Tokyo – it has a lot in common with the games he’s made before. Similarly, the characters you’ll meet in Metaphor, despite being different from the Phantom Thieves we’re familiar with, are faced with many of the same emotional pressures such as prejudice, fear, and anxiety.
“Metaphor is a game where the characters are around teenage age, but they’re not facing [traditional] teenager problems,” Hashino says, inferring that the characters you meet will struggle with a lot more than typical teen drama like peer pressure and romance. “They’re facing anxiety and all these other big things that affect everybody, no matter who they are, where they are, or how old they are.” So while Metaphor: ReFantazio presents a new world with new characters, many of its themes can be found in Hashino’s other games.
Indeed, whether it’s Persona, Shin Megami Tensei or Metaphor, getting under the skin of each character is core to the experience. It’s something Hashino believes comes from the people who make the games, and that he prefers projects in which you can see a developer’s true self: “I feel like if you have these super highly polished games that look like they were designed by a bunch of people in a CEO boardroom, that doesn’t really excited me — it doesn’t really interest me”, he admits, bluntly. “But when I see these sorts of games [which reveal a little about the people that made them], it really fills me with the motivation to keep developing,” he says. “That these artists, these creatives, had something they really wanted to say is where I get all of my inspiration from, and the drive to continue to be creative myself.”
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
Fortnitemares 2024, Fortnite’s annual Halloween event, goes live today and will feature the return of Horde Rush, a pile of fresh quests and rewards, and a host of recognisable, horror-themed outfits hitting the Shop.
Horde Rush will be available for the duration of this year’s event, and players will be able to complete Horde Rush quests and Rocket Racing Nitemares quests for XP that will grant a variety of rewards.
Fornitemares 2024 also arrives with a new chainsaw weapon dubbed the Boom Billy, which can be used to carve through enemies (or thrust into the ground and revved to drag your character forward at “frightening speeds”). In addition to this, the Wood Stake Shotgun, Pumpkin Launcher, and Witch Broom are all returning for this year’s event.
New outfits include Billy the Puppet from Saw, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pumpkin King and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Marvel’s Mephisto, She-Venom, and Agony, plus Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, Captain Hook, Ravemello, and Edward Scissorhands. There will be an opportunity to unlock the She-Venom and Agony outfits before they arrive in the Shop for players who take part in the Symbiote Cup.
Fortnitemares 2024, which will run until the end of Chapter 5, Season 4, is just the latest salvo of content in Fornite’s quest to absorb and homogenize all pop culture on the planet. Fortnite announcements in the past… fortnight alone include a new Fast & Furious vehicle and the arrival of… Shaquille O’Neal.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the second Ty the Tasmanian Tiger game, Krome Studios has shared an update about its upcoming physical Switch bundle.
Following the initial announcement back in April, the Aussie developer has now confirmed the Bush Rescue Bundle will be arriving later this month on 25th October 2025 alongside a new trailer which you can check out above.
