Upon booting it up for the very first time, Darkest Dungeon 2 greets you with a message that plainly informs you that you’re going to fail… a lot… while trying to overcome its many challenges. It does this not to discourage you, but to set expectations. Keeping with the precedent set by the first Darkest Dungeon, this sequel is the kind of game that doesn’t pull its punches as you work to achieve mastery over its various systems. Many may be put off by developer Red Hook Studios’ uncompromising approach to difficulty, but those who stick it out will find that Darkest Dungeon 2 offers some of the most rewarding experiences one can find in a roguelike RPG adventure. Perhaps most importantly, this new entry also isn’t afraid to try some new things that set it noticeably apart from its predecessor.
Getting its first full release on PC back in May 2023 following 18 months of Early Access, Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place in a grim, Lovecraftian world overrun by all manner of undead creatures and eldritch abominations after an academic named The Scholar messed around with an ancient relic called the Iron Crown. All the horrors stem from a mountain looming ominously in the distance, and you’re thus tasked with assembling a team of four adventurers and using their combat and survival skills to help you carry a flame called Hope aboard a stagecoach to the mountain, where you will confront the source of the evil and hopefully rid the land of it for good.
Hi PlayStation community—I’m Chris Stair, the creative director of Squid Shock Studios, and I’m excited to have an opportunity to share some insights into our first game, Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, a hand-drawn action-platformer coming out on PlayStation 5 on July 17.
Some of the big inspirations for Bō are the 2D action-exploration games I grew up playing. I love the wonder and mystery that comes with exploration, the thrill of finding new abilities, and the sense of satisfaction when you figure out how to use those skills you’d found to uncover a secret path.
Some of my favorite games in the genre also have really memorable traversal: bombing yourself up a wall, launching yourself off enemies, or just backwards dashing through a castle hall. In Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, we wanted to create a movement and combat system with its own distinctive, rewarding rhythm—something that can make you feel like you’ve entered a “flow” state when everything comes together—and wanted to talk a bit more about that with you today.
Get the flow going
Bō isn’t capable of doing a double jump by default, so one technique you’ll need to learn early on is what we call the Bump. When Bō strikes an object or an enemy with the Equinox Staff while airborne, you’ll glow teal, giving you the ability to do a mid-air jump. If you strike something again after that second jump, you’ll glow again and can do a third jump, and so on.
You’ll frequently combine this with Bō’s Pogo move to get even more airtime. If you press down and strike an object while you’re on the descent, you’ll not only immediately bounce up and get some height, but you’ll reset your jump ability too, enabling you to perform another mid-air leap right afterward.
And as long as there are objects or monsters in the environment to hit, you can keep Bumping and Pogoing basically indefinitely, staying airborne for as long as you can keep up the rhythm. It becomes a little game of its own.
Eventually, you’ll discover other traversal abilities that let you dash or smash downward forcefully through the air. We hope that as you play and get familiar with your abilities, you’ll start to see opportunities throughout the game for all of these things to work together—enemy spawns during a boss battle, seemingly incidental environmental objects, curious platform placement—and get into a really rewarding groove.
Trouble brewing
These abilities aren’t just for movement; they power your combat skills, too. One critical component of the action is the mystic Tea Kettle you get early on from Asahi, a rabbit tentaihana (a sprite-like being) who plays a central role in your entire journey.
When you strike enemies with your Equinox Staff, including when you Bump or Pogo, you’ll siphon their energy into the kettle and brew up some tea. You can then use that tea in a number of ways, such as restoring your health (if you can find a moment of peace) or summoning one of the Daruma Dolls you’ve collected, which unleash some of the game’s most powerful attacks.
The Daruma Dolls especially love hot tea. The hotter your tea is when you summon a Daruma, the more devastating their attack will be. And the way you heat up your tea kettle is, you probably guessed it, by staying airborne in combat as long as you can. So, we really tried to create a system where airborne agility and combat prowess are intertwined.
We designed Bō’s areas and encounters around this idea. Seemingly uncrossable chasms with an archipelago of enemies who serve as your path. Boss battles where you’re bouncing higher and higher off little foes, building momentum to blast the boss’s head with a potent Daruma Doll strike. All with the goal of making it fairly simple to learn, but challenging and rewarding to master.
The boiling point
While we drew a lot of inspiration from 2D action-exploration games, the world and gameplay also draw a lot from Japanese folklore and traditions. The character of Bō is in part inspired by stories of Princess Kaguya and Momotaro. Many of the yokai and monsters that Bō battles represent our own creative twists on classic folktales, like your confrontation with the massive Hashihime who guards the bridge in Bō’s world. Bō powers up the Daruma Dolls by finding ink to draw additional eyes, which in our real world is linked to achieving goals and good fortune. Bō can also collect and equip a wide range of Omamori, amulets that grant you bonuses to customize your gameplay.
Download the image
There’s a lot more for you to explore and many more ways to find your flow for yourself, waiting in Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus. We hope you’ll check it out when the game arrives on PlayStation 5 on July 17.
Death Game Hotel came out last week – a comically gory game in which players play casino-style card games around a table and raise the stakes by betting their own limbs. It’s a VR game, which is a break from the norm for White Owls, the studio run by Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro (then again, what is their “norm”?). It’s also got a big multiplayer component, with lots of jovial bubble-popping and chicken-squeezing between the comedy blood spurts. And this taste of multiplayer mischief has Swery’s head percolating. This game won’t be his last dipped toe in the multiplayer ocean, he told us.
“In the future,” said Swery, “I would like to leverage this experience to challenge myself with something new in the online multiplayer realm (something you probably haven’t even imagined yet).”
“We are no longer moving forward with our partnership with Binge for a Driver series,” a Ubisoft spokesperson said. “We are actively working on other exciting projects related to the franchise and can’t wait to share more information in the future.”
We are actively working on other exciting projects related to the franchise.
Ubisoft hasn’t been particularly kind to the Driver franchise recently, having not released a mainline game since 2011’s Driver: San Francisco and Driver: Renegade 3D. A mobile game called Driver: Speedboat Paradise was released in 2014, but the franchise hasn’t made a peep since.
Fans were therefore surprised by the 2021 announcement of a Driver TV show that would “focus on undercover agent and ex-racecar driver John Tanner as he tries to take down a crime syndicate.”
No word on a franchise reboot came alongside it though, and Ubisoft’s latest comment that “exciting projects related to the franchise” still leaves all things Driver up in the air. The fact Ubisoft is still thinking about Driver may be enough for some fans, however.
In our 8/10 review of the last game, IGN said: “Driver: San Francisco has one game-changing, eyebrow-raising idea and it pulls it off with aplomb, infusing the OTT arcade racing with unparalleled variety and a ridiculous supernatural twist whilst staying true to its Seventies chase-movie roots.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
If there’s one series that can be relied upon to dole out 80-hour helpings of joy straight into my eager face at regularly scheduled intervals, it’s the RPG brawler stylings of Yakuza/Like A Dragon. One could, I believe, make a convincing argument for Yakuza 0 being – if not the best videogame ever made – then at least the most videogame. While this coming October’s Amazon series won’t be the first live action adaption of Yakuza, I am hopeful its episodic format will give its characters a bit more room to breathe. Or, according to Kiryu actor Ryoma Takeuchi in an interview with IGN, to find the love they’ve always longed for.
The latest Splatfest event is over and, after some valiant battling from all sides, it’s ‘Team Beach’ that managed to come out on top this time around.
An image of the next mainline BioShock has reportedly leaked online, although it reveals next to nothing about the game.
MP1ST published an image it had unearthed from the showreel of a visual effects artist who works for publisher 2K. IGN has asked 2K for comment.
According to the site, the image is taken from a 2021 showreel that depicts an early demo build of the game, so it’s already years out of date and probably doesn’t reflect what fans can expect to play when the next BioShock eventually comes out.
It includes the expected first-person shooter perspective from the previous BioShock games, as well as a basic user interface and what’s called a ‘Ricochet Shotgun.’ We see what looks like BioShock-style plasmid powers in icon form, triggered by controller bumper button presses. It’s hard to tell what these are meant to indicate, but one looks like an electricity bolt, which would be very BioShock. Another looks like a stopwatch, so perhaps there were, and still are, plans to be able to pause time during gameplay.
The character is facing what looks like a burning orb set atop a pedestal of some kind. Of note: the codename Parkside is displayed on the image, which tallies with a 2019 Kotaku report that revealed the same codename, and a recent Epic Game Store leak of video game codenames.
2K announced the upcoming BioShock sequel in 2019. It’s in development at 2K studio Cloud Chamber after initially being outsourced to Halo support studio Certain Affinity. 2K is yet to call the game BioShock 4, so it remains unclear whether it will be a sequel, a prequel, or something separate to what’s come before.
But we do know it’s set in what 2K has called a “new and fantastical world”, so don’t expect a return to Rapture or Columbia, the settings of BioShock 1 and 2, and Bioshock Infinite, respectively.
Original BioShock development chief Ken Levine is not involved. After Levine left Irrational Games and the studio was shut down he set up a new developer called Campfire Games, later named Ghost Story Games, to work on Judas.
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.
“Honey, I shrunk the first-person puzzler. Twice.” This is how I like to imagine the designer of Supraworld explaining the hijinks that unfold in his life. Supraworld, the sequel to toybox explorer Supraland, is going to hit early access this year, say developers Supra Games in an update post on Steam. These are happy words for anyone who enjoyed 2019’s dander among the sandcastles and erasers. A lot of games offer a “sandbox” but in Supraland, the entire world really did take place in exactly that – a sandbox out in a garden, full of toys. The sequel’s launch into early access “might be in october,” says the post. “We’ll see.”
The reveal of upcoming Nintendo Switch exclusive The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom caught the eye because it features Zelda as the protagonist — a first for the series. But according to an age-rating for the game Link is playable, too.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) published its listing for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and it mentions that players can control Link to defeat enemies using his famous sword and arrow attacks. Zelda is also mentioned in the description as using a magic wand to summon creatures for battle, as revealed in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s debut trailer, below.
Here’s the The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom rating summary, still live at the time of this article’s publication, in full:
This is an adventure game in which players assume the role of Zelda as she attempts to dispel rifts throughout Hyrule and rescue Link. From a ¾-overhead perspective, players explore various environments while fighting stylized enemies (e.g., humans, creatures). As Link, players use a sword and arrows to defeat enemies; Zelda can use a magic wand to summon creatures (e.g., wind-up knights, pig soldiers, slime) for battle. Some enemies can be defeated by being set on fire; other creatures dissolve into mist when defeated. Battle sequences are somewhat frenetic, with several enemies attacking/fighting at once.
So, how might Link be playable in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom? Fans already have plenty of theories, the most common of which is that the game starts with a prologue in which a fully kitted out Link is playable before he is spirited away and replaced with a playable Zelda for the remainder of the game.
Indeed, the The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom debut trailer teases such a setup, with an opening fight between Link and franchise villain Ganon that perhaps is actual gameplay rather than a cutscene as most had assumed it to be. The question now is whether Link will also be playable in any other section of the game, or whether it’s Zelda only from then on out.
Upon its reveal, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom sparked all sorts of fan theories, including where and when it takes place in the Zelda timeline. Some have suggested that the Hyrule we see in the trailer lines up with the map from A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds, although many dispute this.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom launches on Nintendo Switch on September 26, 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.
Lots of games use frogs as a means to appeal to those who believe they are cute, me being one of those people. The humble croaker dominates the wholesome category, where they take centre stage in farming sims or as detectives or as green lads who hop over platforms and hurt enemies by lashing them with their tongues.
Schim is different: you play as a frog of the shadows, not some green attention-seeker. And in a mundane world of vibrant colour, you’re to bounce between patches of shade in search of a human pal whose shadow you’ve been unwittingly severed from. What ensues is a charming puzzler of both freedom and flow, which genuinely has you view everyday environments through the googly eyes of a phantom amphibian. It’s a lovely thing, if perhaps not as emotionally charged as it implies early on.
