From Software has unveiled a new character for Elden Ring Nightreign, its upcoming co-op spinoff of the acclaimed action game. Meet Ironeye, a ranged-based warrior. 

The Ironeye is Elden Ring: Nightreign’s latest Nightfarer (the game’s playable warriors) and specializes in picking off enemies from afar, as evidenced by their massive bow. In addition to dealing damage from a distance, the Ironeye can also revive fallen teammates from far away. Although Ironeye excels in wielding dexterity weapons, it can use any weapon as with all Nightfarers. Watch the fighter in action in the trailer below. 

Elden Ring: Nightreign was first revealed during last year’s Game Awards and is a standalone PvE multiplayer experience. Up to three players work together (though you can play solo) to survive a session-based three-day cycle within a condensed version of the Lands Between. Each day they’ll battle challenging enemies and a powerful boss once night falls, all while discovering increasingly powerful weapons and gear. 

Nightreign launches on May 30 for $39.99 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. For more on Elden Ring, check out our reviews of the original game and its Shadows of the Erdtree expansion.

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5 Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch Publisher: PlayStation Studios, MLB Developer: Sony Interactive Entertainment San Diego Studio Release: March 18, 2025

Sports video game series, much like real-world sports franchises, tend to ebb and flow throughout the years. A stretch of a few consecutive good campaigns can be abruptly interrupted by an unexpected downturn plagued by unforced errors or a full-on rebuilding year. As you look at the sports gaming landscape, that has been true of nearly every series, but historically, MLB The Show has remained consistent throughout much of its existence. Though this year is more about staying the course through incremental improvements rather than massive innovations, MLB The Show 25 maintains the franchise's high standard of quality and entertainment, making for one of the better sports games of the last 12 months.

Stepping onto the diamond feels as good as it ever has. New elements like Ambush Hitting, which lets you guess where the pitcher is targeting for batting bonuses, and a new throw meter for fielders are good additional options, but after trying them, I reverted back to my settings from last year's game. Whether you're taking the mound, stepping into the batter's box, snagging a line drive out of the air, or timing your jump to second, I was hooked on maximizing each opportunity to either pad my player's stats or improve my team's chances in a close game. 

Those close games, which MLB The Show 25 masterfully engineers through its ever-calibrating Dynamic Difficulty setting, led to multiple white-knuckled affairs as I tried to maintain a minuscule lead into the late innings or battle back from the depths of defeat. Few feelings in gaming are worse than being fooled by a breaking ball in the bottom of the ninth to foil a good opportunity to take home the win, and watching my opponent's no-doubt homer soar over the fence after a poorly executed pitch instills a distinct sense of helplessness. Conversely, I lost count of the times I pumped my fist as I either drove in the winning run or my closer powered a 100 MPH fastball into the catcher's mitt to clinch the victory. 

Those thrills persist regardless of the mode. Short-term players can enjoy playing in exhibitions, online matches, or even the returning Retro mode that emulates the presentation and feeling of playing a '90s baseball video game, but I spent most of my time in the long-form modes. Taking control of my favorite team in hopes of capturing a championship is a highlight of any sports game for me, so I enjoyed getting into the weeds of Franchise mode. Controlling nearly every aspect of the organization from scouting and budgeting to player transactions and on-the-field action is a wannabe GM's dream come true; I particularly appreciate the new Free Agency board which lets you target specific players for negotiations. 

However, I continue to be drawn to March to October. This more narrative-focused mode strips away most of the management aspects and puts you on the field for impactful moments across multiple seasons. It's the best way to play through a season or two as fast as possible, and I love that you can convert your save file to the more in-depth Franchise mode in the offseason. 

After a World Series championship in March to October, my main attraction became Road to the Show. Here, you start a career as a young player and work your way up through the Minors en route to becoming a superstar in the Majors. This iteration continues the RPG-style progression of rewarding you for good plays and letting you unlock and upgrade situational Perks, which, in turn, lets you develop a player to your preferred play style. MLB The Show 25 offers microtransactions to boost your character, but it's nowhere near as in-your-face as the similar career modes found in NBA 2K and Madden. This year's iteration also adds a truncated college experience where you can opt to play a few games for one of eight universities. I appreciated being able to go to UCLA instead of the first team that drafted me, but the collegiate stint was so brief that it left no meaningful impact on my player's story.

MLB The Show 25's most unique mode in recent years has been Storylines, which shines a light on legends from The Negro Leagues. This third season highlighting this underrepresented corner of professional baseball history doesn't feature the household names of past years, but I loved learning about the three players through what essentially amounts to an interactive museum. Complete with historical footage and commentary from the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, I relished familiarizing myself with the careers and legends of players like Cool Papa Bell and Bullet Rogan. My only criticism of this mode is that I was still hungry for more by the time I completed the brief selection of missions. 

I was able to satiate my desire for additional historical content through Moments, which lets you relive bygone eras with iconic players, but I'm disappointed that most of the historical content and players are locked behind the card-collection mode Diamond Dynasty. I would have loved the ability to play in Exhibition as specific teams from the past, like some of the classic Yankees teams or the late-'90s Mariners, but that option is sadly absent from this package. Instead, you can acquire many of these players in Diamond Dynasty as you build your custom team to complete various challenges to earn more rewards.

This year, Diamond Dynasty removes sets and seasons in favor of a year-round structure and adds a new roguelike board-game mode called Diamond Quest. Traversing and uncovering a board is a novel concept, but the same roguelike frustrations about losing progress permeate as I couldn't help but feel deflated each time my run came to an end. Cracking open packs of cards and upgrading your squad with some of history's best players has an immediately appealing hook, but I almost always chose to spend my time in the game in the more traditional modes.

MLB The Show 25's presentation is often incredible, even when you factor in various broadcast suites and commentators. A few glitches in the commentary plagued the title early on, but they've been largely patched out. Now that many of my commentary and animation gripes have been patched, my biggest immersion-breaking nitpick is how the foul-territory nets blink in and out. The broadcast package also looks and sounds great, though the noticeable absence of licensed stadium mainstays, as we see in franchises like Madden, detracts from the overall package. And when the crowd explodes into a crescendo during a big moment for the home team, it sounds artificial. However, custom cheers and jeers from the audience directed at the pitcher or batter by name are a nice touch. 

Though it's almost expected that MLB The Show will have another solid outing, I still can't help but smile when, after my first few games, I realize that baseball is back and we once again have a terrific representation of that in video game form. Whether I was leading my team to the World Series in March to October, charting my player's career in Road to the Show, or learning about the game's history in Storylines, I continually needed to pull myself away from playing "just one more." MLB The Show 25 delivers perhaps the most well-rounded package of any of the mainstream sports video games, making for a title I first fired up during Spring Training and could very well still be playing when the World Series rolls around.

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Jagex has revealed RuneScape: Dragonwilds, a new open-world survival game set within the popular RuneScape universe. The game is slated to launch in Steam Early Access very soon.

Developed in Unreal Engine 5, Dragonwilds unfolds on the lost continent of Ashenfall and tasks players – either alone or with up to three friends – to discover ancient secrets, battle recognizable RuneScape enemies, and, most importantly, survive. That means a robust crafting system allows for base-building and players can forge new gear and spells. 

So far, Jagex has only released two brief teaser videos showcasing the environments and brief snippets of gameplay. A developer Q&A provides a little more detail on what Dragonwilds entails, which we've posted below. 

Jagex stresses that the game is a traditional open-world game rather than an MMO, and features quests, recognizable NPCs, classic RuneScape skills, and, as the subtitle suggests, plenty of dragons. Check out the screenshots gallery below. 

RuneScape: Dragonwilds is releasing on Steam Early Access this Spring. 

The classic 1995 horror adventure game, I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, was recently ported to modern consoles for the first time by Night Dive Studios. In early 2012, issue #225 of Game Informer magazine, former editor Jeff Cork spoke to members of the original development team about creating the unique, terrifying, and unforgettable game. You can find that feature below.

While some younger readers might find it hard to believe, our culture’s interest in post-apocalyptic settings didn’t originate with the Fallout series. Harlan Ellison’s 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” is an early landmark, offering readers an unimaginably bleak look at humanity’s future, with five desperate souls enduring the constant torture of a deranged AI. Despite its sparse characterization and lack of a traditional narrative, it was adapted into a computer game of the same name in 1995. Here’s the story of how Ellison and a pair of designers transformed the story into one of the most disturbing point-and-click adventure games of all time.

When David Sears heard that publisher Cyberdreams was adapting one of Harlan Ellison’s short stories into a game, the longtime fan’s mind began racing. “I was thinking ‘Oh, it could be ‘Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman’; or maybe ‘A Boy and His Dog’; and it’s going to be some kind of RPG or something,’ Sears recalls. “And they said, ‘No, it’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,’ and I was like ‘What?’ At the time, in the game-development community, people said, ‘Oh I love Ellison’s stories, but there’s no way you could turn that into a game.’ I thought, ‘Wow, what have I gotten into?’”

To make the task even more daunting, this was Sears’ first job in game development. Previously, he was a writer and assistant editor at Compute magazine. A feature he wrote on Cyberdreams’ H.R. Geiger collaboration Dark Seed led to a job writing a clue book for the adventure game in the pre-Internet era of 1992, which in turn led to the current offer: Spend a week with the notoriously prickly author Ellison and distill his iconic work – one of the top 10 most reprinted stories in the English language – into his first game-design document.

Sears says that Ellison immediately made him feel welcome. The two talked for a while about Ellison’s writings, science fiction, and other areas of common interest. Sears’ fears of being seen as a fanboy or as being ignorant were unfounded. “I don’t want to damage his reputation, because I’m sure he spent decades building it up, but he’s a real rascal with a heart of gold – but he doesn’t tolerate idiots,” Sears says.

Now came the tough part: turning a tale set in a hopeless world featuring five characters with no real histories into something playable. The story ends with four of the characters dead, with the remaining survivor transformed into a shapeless mass of goo (see sidebar). Super Mario Bros., it wasn’t. The breakthrough came with a simple question. “The question David posed to Harlan that got them started was ‘Why were these people saved? Why did AM decide to save them?’” recalls David Mullich, who produced the game. Ellison was put off by the question, which he told Sears he’d never been asked before. Realizing they were onto something, the pair began working on their concept. The story would be split into five vignettes, each based on one of characters.

“That was going to be the premise of the game – finding out why these characters had been chosen by AM to be tortured and resurrected endlessly and forever,” Sears says. “And then he immediately sat down and started typing on his Olympic manual typewriter.”

Over the next few days, Ellison and Sears began fleshing out each of the five characters, creating deeper histories for them and delving into why they were selected. “I went to work, and I started making my notes, but he had to go first and come up with a premise,” Sears says.

“Harlan wanted to touch on controversial themes,” Mullich recalls. “Each one dealt with a very strong theme.” Some of the issues the game explored included the nature of guilt, sexual assault, and, perhaps most famously, the Holocaust. It was an early attempt to tackle genuinely mature subject matter in an era where “mature” typically meant showing a heroine in a bra.

Since Ellison was responsible for steering the adaptation’s creative direction, Sears found himself with free time in that first week while he waited for Ellison’s notes. The writer would offer Sears distractions, such as recommending that he go out onto the home’s balcony and enjoy the view. When those didn’t work, Ellison dug into Sears’ interests. “What do you like to read? Do you like comics?” Sears recalls Ellison asking, with Sears replying that he liked Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. “Dialing from memory he makes a call and says ‘Hey Neil, this is David, I’m collaborating with him on a game for Cyberdreams. He’s a fan and he’d love to talk to you about your work.’ So Neil Gaiman talked to me for about an hour, straight off the plane from Mississippi.” Later, Sears had lunch with Babylon 5 writer and producer J. Michael Straczynski, and was among the first to see the show’s pilot episode. “Harlan went out of his way to be a great host.”

Of course, there was still plenty of work to do. “I worked with [Ellison’s notes]over the course of a week in collaboration with Harlan to turn out what we both thought was a really, really good design document,” Sears says. “Cyberdreams disagreed, and they said it was just a proposal.” Sears collaborated with Ellison for an additional week before returning home to Mississippi, where he finished his work on the document over the next six weeks.

Shortly afterward, Mullich, a producer at Cyberdreams, got involved in the project. For him, the opportunity to work with the license was the realization of a dream. “‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ is my favorite short story of all time,” he recalls. Coincidentally, Mullich learned about the game during a talk at a gaming industry conference. “There was a presentation there with David Sears and Harlan Ellison talking about this great game that they had developed, and I was in the audience for that. I was thinking at the time ‘Harlan is my favorite short-story writer, this is my favorite short story, and who’s this guy David Sears? I’ve never heard of him before. I should be the one doing this game!’ So that’s how I came into it.”

Mullich whipped Sears’ inaugural work into shape for Cyberdreams. “It wasn’t organized in the way that a typical game design document is. As I went through it, the story was great and I loved how he’d adapted the work, but I could tell that it was overly simplistic. There weren’t enough puzzles in it, there wasn’t enough dialogue, and it wasn’t formatted in a way that would be easy for a programming team to understand it.” It was up to Mullich to meet with Ellison and revise the document. There, he got a dose of the Ellison that fans are more familiar with. Mullich was preparing to give a presentation of an early build of the game on a PC in Ellison’s kitchen. Ellison made a vague gesture toward an outlet, which was hidden under a potted plant, behind a booth. Noticing Mullich’s difficulty in finding it, Ellison muttered, “Another one of the Cyberdreams’ brain trust.”

Fortunately, Mullich was able to establish a friendly working relationship by talking about his desire to make games that were intellectually stimulating, such as his Apple PC game based on The Prisoner television show. That led to a more productive environment.

Mullich would go to Ellison with proposed dialogue, and Ellison would revise it. “He’d come out 20 minutes later with pure gold. And other times he’d leave stuff and I’d say Harlan, this is terrible. You can do better than this. He’d go ‘Ack, you’re right,’ and he’d go back and revise it. We established a working relationship of mutual respect where we could criticize each other, which was good. Because there was a lot of creative work I had to do.” Mullich estimates that Ellison wrote about 20 percent of the game’s dialogue, with the remaining 80 percent split evenly between Sears and himself.

Ellison wasn’t a gamer, which meant that Mullich sometimes had to explain some of the medium’s conventions to the author. One of Gorrister’s puzzles, for example, involved his wife and mother-in-law trapped in a freezer, dangling from meathooks. Gorrister’s story revolved around the character forgiving his family for a string of traumas, and Ellison thought he had come up with a great mind-teaser. “To solve the puzzle you have to let her off the hook,” Mullich remembers Ellison saying. “You metaphorically have to take her off the hook. In order to let it go, you physically have to do that. No one will think of that!” Mullich had to break it to him gently that players were acclimated to doing just that. “Harlan, that’s the first thing that the player is going to do,” Mullich told him. “They go in, they click everything they can, and that’s the first thing they’re going to do.”

Even if Ellison didn’t know much about game design, his pragmatism and flexibility made the process much easier. “The reason he told me [he got involved with the project was] he’d never done a game before and he was interested in taking on the challenge,” Mullich says. “Fortunately he was really good at knowing what was practical and what wasn’t. This far along, he wouldn’t take something that he wasn’t happy with and jettison it completely; he’d try to make adjustments to it and adapt it so that it would work at least a little bit better. He was great to work with.”

Sears had a similar experience when working on the game’s multiple endings. He had to explain to Ellison why players wouldn’t have been satisfied if all paths led to crushing defeat. “OK. This is the thing about games,” he explained. “We can’t have only negative, punishing endings. We can have an optimistic ending. Yeah, we’re giving humanity another shot, but at the same time it’s Harlan’s universe, and there’s every chance these people are going to screw it up again.”

Once the game design was completed, Cyberdreams made the decision to shift development away from its internal team and have Dreamer’s Guild take the reins. Mullich says the studio already had an internal game engine that was appropriate for I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which made the decision easier.

The game was published on Halloween, 1995, an appropriate release for a game that dealt with uncomfortably realistic horrors. Critics raved about the game’s often depressing content and the willingness to tackle previously taboo topics. As both Sears and Mullich said time and time again, though the subject matter was gruesome and Ellison was at times notoriously tough to work with, their work on I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream remains a creative high point in their careers.

Sears, now a creative director at Ubisoft working on the new Rainbow 6 Patriots, actually credits Ellison for his career. About eight weeks after finishing his work with the game, Sears says he got a call from the author. “Hey listen, I’m the keynote speaker at GDC,” Ellison said. “I want you to speak on a panel with me, and I want you to have a job in Los Angeles, because you’re too good to spend your time in Mississippi.”

After finishing the pre-keynote dinner, Ellison took the stage and made an announcement: David Sears was great to work with, and he needed a job. Before Ellison was going to give his presentation, he wanted everyone to bring their business cards up to the stage and put them in a glass fishbowl that he’d brought with him. “And he’s like ‘I’m not kidding,’” Sears says. “‘And after the keynote, David will draw one card from the bowl, and that’s who he will work for.’ I’m pretty comfortable talking in large groups, but at the time not so much. We filled up half the fishbowl, so I had a full Rolodex just for showing up. Three days later I had a job at Virgin Games.

“If he called me today and said, ‘I need you to fix the plumbing in my bathroom,’ I’d be on a plane.”

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was first published in the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction in March 1967. It’s set 109 years after the collapse of human civilization following a war between the U.S., China, and Russia. A group of computers called AM, short for Allied Mastercomputer, became self aware, taking control of the war effort and eliminating everyone on the planet aside from five survivors. Those remaining few have spent the intervening years being continually tortured physically and psychologically by AM. The story concludes with the characters attacking one another after being led on a fruitless hike with the promise of food at journey’s end. When they arrive at their destination, they discover canned goods, but no can opener. The five attack and kill each other, with AM intervening just before the story’s narrator, Ted, is able to take his own life. In retaliation, and to prevent his last plaything from harming himself, AM transforms Ted into a blob of goo. The story ends with the titular line, “I have no mouth, and I must scream.”

To say that adapting the short story into a game was challenging is an understatement. Aside from a few descriptive sentences and skeletal backstories, the story’s five characters are essentially sketches. This is how Harlan Ellison and designers David Sears and David Mullich transformed those stark outlines into fully realized characters with individual plotlines.

“I remember having some questions about the storyline David Sears had written for Ted, but when I showed it to Harlan, he said that Sears had written a story very different from what they originally discussed,” Mullich says. “However, when I asked him to tell me about the story he and Sears had originally planned for Ted, Harlan said he couldn’t remember it. We discussed several ways of altering the story. Unfortunately I don’t remember any of the details, but I do remember that I made one suggestion that caused Harlan to give me his most cutting insult: ‘You’re thinking like a television producer!’”

Sears’ memories are as foggy as Ellison’s were at the time, though he offers a possible explanation for Ted’s fashion choice of a sweater tied around his neck: “Yuppies were popular at the time.”

“This was my least favorite of the storylines, although I don’t quite remember why I didn’t much care for it,” Mullich says. Benny’s storyline focused on redemption and forgiveness, as the character found himself haunted by people he betrayed as he explored a brutal tribal society. “Someone recently reminded me that Benny was the character who was the most altered from the original story, in which he was a homosexual scientist. Looking back, I think it might have been a lost opportunity to write a story about someone struggling with the challenges of being homosexual.”

Sears recalls the gay angle, and says that he remembered it being present in his initial draft, even though Benny mentions having a wife. “I believe he was still gay in our version. Even if you have a wife, that doesn’t mean you’re not. It might have been a dropped thread.”

“She was tortured. Black women in video games? Someone suffering the psychic fallout of being brutally raped? Again, kind of a groundbreaking character,” Sears says. “I most remember staying up late across several nights and writing the dialogue for the conversation for the confrontation between Ellen and her rapist,” says Mullich. “My infant son was undergoing chemotherapy at that time, and he would have week-long stays in the hospital. I’d stay with him overnight on those occasions, and we’d share the hospital room with another child cancer patient. One time we shared a room with a teenage girl whose chances weren’t good, and she knew it. Once night she woke up terrified and had to speak to a nurse to calm her down. I channeled that memory when trying to imagine the terror Ellen would have gone through in confronting her rapist.”

“This was my favorite of the storylines, I loved the artwork – the desert, the iron Zeppelin – and I found the story to be the most metaphorical and dream-like,” says Mullich.

Gorrister’s world was indeed rich with memorable locations, which he navigated while struggling to cope with feelings about his estranged wife.

When asked what he remembers about Gorrister’s storyline, Sears is quick to respond: “Meathooks,” he says, laughing. “I think I’m revealing a little more about how my mind works than I’d intended.” He also remembers an appearance from one of the game’s memorable NPCs, a talking jackal. “I do remember thinking we need a talking head in here, and it ended up being a jackal. I don’t remember if that was Harlan or me.”

“What I most remember about Nimdok is waiting for the controversy that never came about his story involving the Holocaust,” Mullich recalls. “He was blessed and cursed with a memorable name, and one of the most diabolical back stories,” Sears adds. “Certainly, if we wanted to do something like that [now] we would spend a lot more time defining the lines we wouldn’t cross, careful presentation of this character, and we certainly couldn’t let people know right away what he was. You’d have to build an affinity for him and then we’d slowly reveal these horrors. At the time, we were still on the frontier. The industry was still small enough where publishers would take crazy chances on stuff and see if it stuck.” Some of those crazy chances include allowing the player to take on the role of a Nazi doctor, performing spinal surgery on a child in a concentration camp, and the Holocaust setting itself.

Go here to watch a complete playthrough of the game.

Reviewed on: PC Platform: PC Publisher: Evil Trout Developer: Robin Ward Release: January 15, 2025

It’s way past midnight, I’m chugging an ill-advised late-night coffee, and I’m intensely tapping my fingers, pondering what to type into a fake ‘90s-era search engine. I tell myself I’ll call it a night after I find one more lead confirming another relative’s place on their family tree. I would spend many evenings reciting the same lie to myself. The Roottrees Are Dead is an investigative mystery game that captivated, surprised, stumped, and, occasionally, infuriated me. It also became my first obsession of 2025. 

Set in 1998, the president of a successful candy and fashion empire, his wife, and his three celebrity teenage daughters tragically perish in a plane crash. These are the Roottrees, and they hail from a generationally wealthy family whose corporate empire dates back to the late 19th century. You control an investigator hired by a mysterious client to uncover every blood relative of the Roottrees to piece together their family tree for an unknown purpose. The premise immediately hooked me, and the ensuing mystery rewarded my curiosity. 

The internet is your primary tool to fill an expansive family tree with a relative’s birth name, photo, and occupation. Similar to games like Her Story, punching search terms into an internet search engine, a library database, or various magazine/newspaper archives unearths evidence such as diaries, photographs, and even music tracks, which yields new clues to search. It’s an engrossing exercise, not only because I feel like a real sleuth trying to expose the truth, but because the information revealed along the way is fascinating. The Roottree family is an eclectic mess of a clan whose relationships are mired in infidelities, betrayals, and other controversies. As much as I wanted to learn the truth about their heritage, I had as much fun learning about each family member as a personality, whether they’re an old Hollywood starlet or a spirited televangelist. 

The game throws plenty of fun curveballs acting as small puzzles in themselves, such as finding the true first name of someone largely known by a nickname, discovering the identities of older relatives with minimal online footprints, or learning the maiden name of a woman who’s endured multiple divorces. Occupations can be similarly obscured since you need a Roottree’s most recent job. Finding answers is a tricky but rewarding exercise of uncovering obscure online resources and using context clues to deduce major discoveries. The writing shines here, as solutions are cleverly hidden in plain sight, and seemingly unrelated materials or people can fit together like perfect puzzle pieces. Even when I failed to make a connection, learning the answer never made me feel disgruntled because it was too opaque; the truth was always right in front of me. I just failed to look at things a certain way. 

Doing enough thoughtful digging can excavate an exact answer outright; however, you often have just enough information to approach the finish line and must connect the dots to take an educated leap of faith. It never feels like I’m blindly guessing when I do this, as I usually have plenty of ammunition to back up my suspicions. That the game requires you to fill a batch of identities at a time before it “locks” them – confirming the correct entries and thus eliminating them from the pool – means I need to be pretty confident about my theories, further encouraging thorough investigation. 

Initially mundane or irrelevant evidence may become a goldmine of vital clues when reexamined with fresh perspectives. Every breakthrough continually feels like a triumph in that sense, and I love how the game regularly makes old evidence feel exciting again. With so much information to juggle, the in-game notepad is an invaluable tool. It allows players to jot down clues, copy and paste entire text passages from articles, create link shortcuts to previous search results for easy access, and other quality-of-life features. And when you think you have all the answers, the game changes the question with an even tougher second campaign that builds upon your initial investigation and is a great final exam of your newly developed deductive skills. 

Getting stuck is inevitable, but the large family tree makes it easy to pause work on one challenging thread to tackle several others (provided you can keep your information straight, but that’s on you). I also appreciate how the game encourages players to keep looking while preventing them from going down the wrong trains of thought for long. Each piece of evidence is accompanied by a number denoting the amount of relevant clues it contains, and this number fluctuates based on your discoveries. This keeps me from needlessly analyzing materials I’ve siphoned all usefulness from while keeping me encouraged when I hit a wall. I may not know what a World War 2 diary I’ve reviewed countless times has left to offer, but seeing it has one clue remaining ensures there’s still meat left on that bone. And if you’re truly stumped, a well-implemented hint system gradually nudges you in the right direction without giving too much away immediately. 

Additionally, many irrelevant search results flat-out tell players the information isn’t helpful and to move on, sometimes in humorous ways. The Roottrees Are Dead has plenty of false dead ends, but the real ones are clearly communicated. Still, going down unrelated rabbit holes can lead to funny, sometimes fourth-wall-breaking search results. I won’t spoil them, but I always searched terms I knew had no connection to the case just to see how the game would respond.  

The best thing a puzzle game can do is make you feel smart; The Roottrees Are Dead made me feel like the second coming of Sherlock Holmes. Its exceptional mystery is bolstered by stimulating puzzle-solving, a satisfying ending, and a cozy nostalgia that makes it weirdly relaxing to mull over a cup of coffee. Don’t let this quirky search for answers pass you by. 

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Foundation is Now Available on Steam and is 25% off!*Foundation is a grid-less, laidback medi city-building game with a focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management.*Offer ends February 7 at 10AM Pacific Time

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:Updated the Brain Cane to fix problems with the texture and phong valueUpdated The Battle MusicAdded missing Hat styleFixed the models due to clipping on Heavy's ears and misalignment on EngineerImproved and strengthen the Noise CancellationUpdated the materials to fix it not being shinyUpdated the backpack icon to reflect the materials changeUpdated cp_gravelpit_snowyFixed potential incompatibility with external VScript files (thanks Le Codex!)Re-implemented cubemap reflections in ice caveFixed perch spotsUpdated vsh_distillery, vsh_maul, vsh_nucleus, vsh_outburst, vsh_skirmish, and vsh_tinyrockRestored Hale's resistance to knockback back to 75%Reduced bonus flame damage against Hale from 50% to 25%Hale can now do 1 extra Brave Jump before the Jump Fatigue kicks in (thanks Wendy)Weighdown is no longer blocked by the Jump Fatigue (thanks Wendy)Removed area-of-effect of Hale's normal punches (thanks Wendy)Demoman shields now absorb 70% of Saxton Punch! damage (compared to normal 50%) to make the following launch into the stratosphere survivableFixed Hale taking mini-crits from Direct Hit and Reserve Shooter while underwater (thanks Bradasparky)Fixed airborne mini-crits of Direct Hit and Reserve Shooter applying against the wielder (thanks Bradasparky)Fixed Hale being able to stomp while underwater (thanks Bradasparky)Fixed Sweeping Charge not working against underwater opponentsFixed the bug that prevented Quick-Fix from mirroring a patient's wall climbing (thanks Bradasparky)Fixed Hale's faulty ground detection (thanks Bradasparky)Fixed Baby Face's Blaster's loss of boost not applying correctly (thanks Whurr and MilkMaster72)Fixed the voice lines refusing to play sometimesUpdated pl_patagoniaStage 1Fixed the cart going under the elevator in extremely rare occasions (Thanks Shocked) Fixed sometimes hearing outside soundscapes inside blue spawnFixed being able to build in a very high rooftop after point AFixed being able to build in blue spawnCart elevator is no longer the glitchiest thing in the universeFixed cart not rolling back after completing the elevator descent sequenceNow, if the cart is rolling into the elevator in overtime, the round timer will be set to 5 seconds left, to avoid unfair loses for blue. Timer will resume once the cart reaches the bottom (Thanks I. C. Wiener).Stage 2Removed rollback from the train container ramp in last point (Thanks b4nny)Gave blue more high ground for last pointAdded an additional dropdown for blue for last pointFixed being able to be teleported into red spawn as blue after capping point ARemoved long hill rollback before point CFixed bots getting stuck on the closed train doors after cap BFixed being able to leave stickies inside blue last spawnFixed being able to get stuck in the point C shortcut door for red. If you get trapped, it will kill you.Fixed a pop-in issue relating to areaportals below point BFixed being able to enter the last blue spawn as redBirdie (Thanks Explocivo808)Stage 3Added a fenced section for the long wood cover wall in last point (Thanks b4nny)Mirrored the window sniper spot in last point chokeFixed being able to build behind a displacement rock wall in last pointRemoved troll teleport spot in last point ending rampAll StagesSlightly lowered sun brightness and slightly raised skylight brightnessImproved skybox transitionsThe cart no longer tries to defy the law of physicsNinjaneers have more freedom to be ninjasThe bots have learned how to play the mapGave the cart another coronación de gloria

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:Added missing No Gloves style for the Consigliere's CoverupAdded missing Versus Saxton Hale kill iconsAdded some tournament medalsFixed Taunt: Curtain Call voice lines overlapping with other Spy voice linesFixed the Playful Aurora and Frisky Morning Unusual effects not moving correctlyUpdated Aurora Skies Unusual effect to fix a timing issueUpdated the Necroprancer to fix an issue with the materialsUpdated the Dusk Duster to fix an issue with the materialsUpdated the Dapper NoelRemade normal map to be compatible with OpenGLRe-baked Diffuse & updated backpack icon to reflect above changesRemoved misplaced ambient occlusionFixed problematic face flexesFixed an issue where Engineer's beard was protruding from his gogglesFixed an issue with the jigglebones being disabledRigged Sniper's hat to be compatible with his melee tauntUpdated Scrooge McDocTransparent lenses are rigged to the correct bone (prp_glasses instead of bip_head) so it should now work correctly with taunts that move the glassesImproved scarf rigging and positioning to allow for better compatibility with shirt cosmeticsUpdated the backpack iconUpdated koth_overcast_finalFixed an issue with the models/materialsAdded back snow coverings (now using displacements) to some props that were missing themFixed misaligned textures in various placesFixed weird lighting bug on a wall in blue spawnFixed 'Hotel' sign not displaying properlyAdded back indicators under some health and ammo kits that were missing themUpdated cp_fortezzaRemoved sniper window leading into lastFixed Engineer being able to build in some doorsFixed some props being solidSlight art pass updateUpdated vsh_maulPlayers can no longer hide from Saxton in the darkFixed props inside other propsFixed z-fighting brushesFixed missing particle effects for the water featureFixed orientation of water feature particlesMinor lighting changes around the cinemaAdjusted LOD change distances for Cinema signUpdated VSH logicGrounded levitating propsAligned misaligned texturesFixed mis-textured wallsClipped upper metal beamsFixed clip brushes sticking out from walls that could be walked onPlayers will now be pushed off of the fire bellAdjusted cinema sign shadowUsed spell check on Saxton's Package signUpdated how music is activated and deactivatedFixed clipping on the hanging big ornaments

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:Improved matchmaking performanceImproved matchmaker behavior for users with less-than-ideal ping levels. The matchmaker should now be quicker to put you in the best available region.Improved matchmaker decision making for cross-region partiesAdded error messages when being ejected from the matchmaking queue due to connectivity or authentication failures, rather than the queue simply silently vanishingFixed the matchmaking settings dialog frequently failing to display any datacentersFixed multiple cases of in-progress casual matches abruptly terminating or failing to be assigned any new players if the game server ever loses connection to SteamUpdated the Mountebank's Masque, Courtier's Collar, and Harlequin's Hooves cosmetic items to fix issues with their paint regionsUpdated cp_gravelpit_snowyFixed a script issueImproved performanceImproved clipping

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:Reverted BLU Scout pants fix because it conflicts with too many existing cosmeticsUpdated the Fleet Commander again to fix import problems from the previous updateUpdated the Phantom Plague and Haunting Haze Unusual effects to fix sometimes spawning away from the playerUpdated cp_freaky_fairFixed issues related to the gamemode logicReapplied check that was mistakenly removed to check if the player is actively buying upgrades in a station or notImplemented new custom system to refund upgrades to hopefully address inconsistencies both in-round and across roundsImplemented logic to handle mismatches in recorded vs actual currency values when leaving the upgrade trigger and having not accepted de-bought upgradesReverted code to do with Ghosts and Sentry busters to fix bugs related to their effects not de-applyingImplemented a way to force kill players to address edge cases where you could survive as the sentry buster past their explosion (Thanks MilkMaster!)Improved the logic which checks if you can apply a new potion effect to yourself to address bugs where effects can overlapFixed sniper and demo shields not having their upgrades clearedFixed canteens not having their values cleared when refunding whilst not equippedIncreased the height of the skyboxIncreased last point capture time from 6s to 7sChanged some clipping to stop giants from building on roofsSmoothed out a divot (Thanks Midnite!)Updated zi_atoll, zi_blazehattan, zi_devastation_final1, zi_murky, zi_sanitarium, and zi_woodsGeneralRe-encoded all Zombie Infection sound effects as .WAVThis fixes issues with sound effects not playing correctly and spewing errors in the consoleBug fixesFixed a bug that caused Sniper's Spit Pool to deal much more damage than intendedFixed a bug that caused team names to not display correctly when playing on mp_tournament modeFixed a bug where Engineer would sometimes scream like a charging Demoman while throwing an EMP GrenadeZombie ChangesSniper's Spit Pool damage vs Survivors no longer stacks when standing in multiple zonesZombie Heavy is no longer immune to Critical HitsZombie Heavy's max health raised to 525 (from 450)Zombie Pyro's max health raised to 250 (from 175)Zombie Pyro now drops a medium health kit on deathSurvivor ChangesCrossbow weapons no longer have a flat damage multiplier against ZombiesThe B.A.S.E Jumper can no longer be deployed if you are one of the last three survivorsJumper Weapons can no longer store reserve ammunitionUpdated zi_murky (additional changes)Added more respawn room triggers around the new spawn zones