Category: Video Games

If you could hire any director to make an Elden Ring movie, who would you pick?

You might settle for fantasy heavyweights like Peter Jackson or Guillermo del Toro, or maybe you’d tap Miguel Sapochnik, the man who brought you many of Game of Thrones’ biggest battles, including Hardhome and Battle of the Bastards. If you’re looking for something a little more avant-garde, you could even pick Robert Eggers (Nosferatu), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), or Bong Joon Ho (Mickey 17) – filmmakers who, like Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, relish in the surreal, cryptic, and uncanny.

Chances are, you wouldn’t pick Alex Garland. The British writer and director is known for the grounded, slow-burning science fiction dramas Ex Machina and Annihilation, as well as the inventively named war films Civil War and Warfare – none of which resemble FromSoftware’s work in any notable way. However, Garland is precisely who film studio A24 has selected to adapt Hidetaka Miyazaki’s magnum opus for the big screen. Considering Garland – who, in addition to directing, is also set to write the screenplay – isn’t one to take his multi-digit checks and phone it in, you have to wonder how he’ll try to make this work.

There’s something about Sonic games where I kind of let my guard down and just enjoy them for what they are. And I’m happy to say that I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which I played an hour of during Summer Game Fest. It’s a kart racer that, in my short time with, nails the core tenets of a good kart racer – fast and intense races, powerups that turn the tide and leave you salty, and a good vibe that celebrates the characters from its source material. I can’t really ask for much more than that, yet there’s still more to chew on that we haven’t seen in previous Sonic racing games.

Let’s start with the CrossWorld mechanic, which varies up each race – the first lap starts on the selected track, then whoever’s in first place in the moment chooses where the entire race warps to for the second lap. This can range from an icy world with aurora borealis in the skybox, to a storming sea among a ship’s wreckage, or a volcanic zone with laser grids as obstacles. And then the third lap returns to the normal track. It’s a novelty that you may get used to over time, but it does provide some level of dynamism from race to race and adds a bit of unpredictability to keep things fresh.

In those crossing worlds, you’ll be flying, hovering, and surfing depending on where you warp to, and so there’s a great sense of variety to your vehicles since you’re not just on the ground drifting with your karts. I quite like the flying sections since your aircraft controls well and brings a certain verticality that’s surprising for a kart racer. If anything, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is blasting your eyeballs with chaos happening on screen, and maybe overdoing it. Not that it’s a major complaint I hold against it, but this is a very visually busy game to the point where it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s really going on – and I think these moments are more in service of the spectacle rather than being a serious competitive racer.

However, it does have that competitive edge with how you outfit your kart. You can customize parts like the body, tires, and boosters to tweak stats such as top speed, acceleration, and handling. What’s more is that you can attach perks to your kart as if it’s a loadout. You get six slots for attachments, and some attachments take up more than one slot – for example, I used a three-slot acceleration booster and a two-slot perk that improved my recovery time after getting hit by an item. And these things actually affected my performance in a meaningful way. I got hit with a rocket in lap three alongside another racer, but was able to pull ahead of them significantly after getting hit because of both of those perks I equipped. So, if you’re really serious about kart racing, I think there’s room for being a real sicko about it.

I only had access to the Grand Prix modes, which pits you in a series of four races, awarding points for your position and determining a winner by the end of the series. It’s pretty standard stuff with a few quirks along the way. I’m not sure if this is embedded in Sonic lore, but one racer will be declared a rival mid-Grand Prix and will act more aggressive toward you and stay more competitive throughout the series. The fourth and final race will also reward more points for first place, so you can turn the tide at the last minute if you’re a few points behind. However, I’m curious about how the other game modes in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will play out, because as fun and dynamic as normal races are, longevity will rely on Sonic Team being able to capitalize on its potential in other creative ways.

Perhaps some of that will come from its crossover characters – not only is this about Sonic as a whole, it’s a celebration of Sega’s recent history as well. During Summer Game Fest, Sega revealed that characters like my precious boy Kasuga Ichiban from Yakuza / Like A Dragon, Joker from Persona 5, and my vocaloid queen Hatsune Miku will all be part of the roster. Seeing Ichiban relive his days of Dragon Kart from the 2020 RPG is adorable and a welcome extension of his character, while seeing Miku on a hovering board racing through Sonic worlds is enough to get me bought in (and we should have Miku in more games, to be honest, shout out to Fortnite). It’s not like crossover characters are a new thing for a Sonic racing game – I mean, look at the wild lineup for Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. But Sega’s catalog has grown a lot since then, so perhaps this new era of characters can spice things up in a way that makes more sense.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t have to revolutionize the kart racing genre, and I think it’s staking its claim on being a fun and carefree racer that celebrates Sonic and the larger Sega pantheon. It’s a vibe, and one that I’ve enjoyed and will look forward to drifting through when it launches on September 25 of this year on the last two PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles, as well as PC.

Cuphead did something in 2017 that we’d arguably never seen before in a video game, or at least nowhere near the degree Cuphead went to: it built an entire game around completely hand-drawn art and animation a la a 1930’s cartoon. We haven’t seen it since probably since doing all of that painstaking visual work by hand is incredibly difficult, time-intensive, and laborious. But now, a new hand-drawn and hand-animated project is getting ready to grace our PCs and consoles. It’s called Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and fully handcrafted art is about the only thing it’s got in common with Cuphead. Mouse is its own, equally gorgeous game, and after getting a look at a hands-off demo, I’m just as interested in it as I was when I first saw Cuphead. Which is to say, I’m very interested.

As you can obviously see, Mouse is in black and white. It’s reminiscent of the Steamboat Willy era of early animation, complete with guns that are always wobbling even when they aren’t in use, as if they’re made of rubber. (More on the guns in a bit.) As you can also plainly see, Mouse is a first-person shooter. In it, you play as Jack Pepper, who in-demand video game voice actor Troy Baker plays with a stereotypical-on-purpose New York accent. He’s an early-20th-century gumshoe, after all, see? He’s got to sound like one.

What I really liked about the demo I saw of Mouse was that it wasn’t just a mindless run-and-gun first-person shooter (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Instead, the mission I saw part of was set at an opera house, where Pepper had to find and question the stage designer. We started at the back door, where we spoke to a waiter and asked about Roland, the aforementioned stage designer. He hasn’t seen him, so in we go to investigate for ourselves.

Inside, the kitchen gives you a better look at the visual aesthetic at play here. Notice how the characters are 2D within the 3D space, not unlike the monsters in the original Doom. A peek through the porthole window of the kitchen door shows off one of Mouse’s detective-y features: reconnaissance, as Jack takes a photo and sees some members of the Big Mouse Party – aka not guys we want anything to do with.

Moving to the back of the kitchen, we meet up with a slick waiter who’s happy to help sneak us upstairs to where we need to go quietly – for $30. We decline the bribe and instead find a vent we can sneak through. A bonus stash of cash hiding in the vent is appreciated, but the bottom falling out of the vent, crash-landing us back outside where we started, is very much not appreciated.

Attempt number two takes us back through the kitchen and into the same vent, carefully crawling around the newly made hole in the floor and taking us to the dressing room, where a Thompson machine gun and some ammo await. You’re not supposed to be in here, of course, and the Big Mouse Party members don’t take kindly to your presence. It’s here that we get our first look at the first-person shooter combat, including one of the gorgeous reload animations.

We hear a muffled voice that might be Roland, but first a safe gives us a chance to see the lockpicking minigame in action, along with what the safe was hiding: a cup of coffee? Then things get really loud, as the wall in front of us blows up and we have to snuff out the bad guy that emerges from the smoke before using TNT ourselves to make a hole in the floor so we can make our way down into the bowels of the opera house.

Finally, we’ve found Roland. He’s been beaten up by the extras, who Jack deduces aren’t extras at all, and learns the Big Mouse Party’s real plan: to assassinate mayoral candidate Stilton, who’s sitting in the balcony for that evening’s show, during intermission, using the cannon on stage that is both full of live ammo and pointed directly at him.

Fast-forward to more combat, including the shotgun, which looks like it packs a nice wallop – and also has a pretty awesome reload animation of its own. Plus a look at explosive barrels that leave the bad guys burning in the most cartoonish way possible. There’s even an ice barrel – liquid nitrogen, perhaps? – that freezes nearby foes when detonated, allowing you to kick them so they shatter into a thousand pieces, Terminator 2-style. Moments later we also got a look at the third weapon featured in the demo: the turpentine gun, which melts these cartoon characters who are literally made of paint, not unlike the Dip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

After a bit of platforming and fighting a new helicopter-tailed enemy type, we found our way back upstairs…only to have a trap door below our feet open up, dumping us back into the basement. It’s here we meet the Old Rat Stuntman, who teaches Jack the double-jump maneuver. After testing it out and discovering a secret – a baseball trading card of “Brie” Ruth (get it, because they’re mice and love cheese?) – we find our way back on stage to sabotage the cannon and save Stilton, which triggers a boss battle with a raging opera performer. The turpentine gun finishes him off, and we get a look at its reload animation, which if you ask me is even cooler than the others we’ve already seen.

The fire from the stage has spread to the rest of the opera house, and we’ve gotta get out of here. But we’re going to have to shoot our way out using every weapon at our disposal. No problem for Jack Pepper. Let’s watch some combat now, uninterrupted.

Finally escaping the building, we meet up with the stage designer, who coughs up what he knows about the performer who’s vanished. Something about a secret lab underneath his mansion? No, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all… And with that, we exit the level and the demo ends.

And so, though I haven’t yet played it myself, from what I’ve seen of Mouse – and you just saw most of what I saw – I’m really eager to give it a try. It seems like it’s got the right lighthearted, somewhat comedic tone while also being self-aware but offering a solid first-person shooter at the core of it. After all, as gorgeous and admirable as its hand-drawn art and animation are, if the gameplay can’t back it up and also maintain my interest in it over the course of its campaign, then it won’t really matter how pretty it is. But at this point, I’m extremely optimistic.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.