Nightingale is the right game for this survival crafting renaissance

Activision studio Toys for Bob — best known for its work on franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Skylanders, and Spyro — is separating from Microsoft and going independent. It isn’t completely leaving Xbox and Activision behind, though, as the studio is looking to form a partnership with those companies.

Remedy Entertainment, the developer behind 2019’s Control and critically acclaimed games like Alan Wake 2, now fully owns the rights to the Control franchise. That means the Finnish studio now has full, for the lack of a better word, control over the future of this series, including its sequel and multiplayer spin-off.

In most survival crafting games, there’s one large world filled with multiple biomes for players to explore. That’s not the case with Nightingale. While there are procedurally generated realms to explore, players are the ones who craft them with an innovative Realm Card system. Anytime players feel like they’ve amply explored the realm they are in or feel like they need to go to a new one to gather resources, a portal must be found or built.

The Pokémon Company revealed during today’s Pokémon Presents showcase that Pokémon Z-A will be released in 2025.

Sometimes I wonder whether every genre fantasy RPG or RPG-inflected game is essentially a journey towards the Big City. Most such games start you off on the periphery of the world, out in the sleepy and/or brutish hamlets of FirstActShire, Chosen One County, and send you on a loose quest towards the cosmopolitan centre, where you'll typically learn about the ultimate villain of the piece, gain access to the juiciest concentration of shops, crafting facilities and quest-givers, and glean some hint at the location of the endgame dungeon. Sometimes the quest takes days of playtime, as in Baldur's Gate 3. Sometimes it takes less than an hour, as in the original Destiny. It's a common-enough device that when an RPG starts you off in the Big City, like Dragon Age 2, or creatively "provincialises" the Big City, like Roadwarden, I feel slightly unnerved.

Tchia will leave the PlayStation Plus Premium and Extra game catalog on March 19. And you really need to play this charming open-world adventure that I called “a new coming-of-age classic” in a four-star review before it’s gone.

With the launches of Helldivers 2, Nightingale, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Foamstars, and Skull & Bones, February 2024 has been packed with new multiplayer games planned to have live service tails.

Microsoft and World’s Edge gave us our first glimpse of its upcoming remaster of real-time strategy game Age of Mythology: Retold during Friday’s New Year, New Age livestream. They also confirmed that it will launch on PC and Xbox later this year.

Nightingale studio Inflexion Games has said it’s prioritising the development of an offline mode for the recently released game.

To celebrate the first anniversary of the PlayStation VR2, Sony revealed a new batch of games coming to its virtual reality headset and confirmed that it’s testing a feature that would let people play PC VR games on their PSVR2.

We finally got our first full look at Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, the expansion for FromSoftware’s critically acclaimed 2022 open-world game. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait too much longer for it, as publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment confirmed a June 21 release date.

Five years ago, we spoke with former Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn as his new Edmonton-based development studio was announced as part of the cloud computing startup Improbable.