Giovanni Colantonio

If you’re looking for a new Switch game to play with your kids following titles like Bluey: The Videogame and Disney Illusion Island, get ready to meet the Moonmins. Snufkin: Melody of Moonminvalley comes to Switch and PC this week, giving the cartoon vagabond his own game. Developed by Hyper Games, the adventure title aims to capture the cartoon joy of Moomin, a Swedish children’s series, with some musical twists.

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We’re only two months into 2024, but it’s already a surprisingly front-loaded year for new games. We kicked the year off with great Like a Dragon, Tekken, and Prince of Persia games in January, but February turned the heat up even more. Persona 3 Reload andFinal Fantasy VII Rebirth gave us two excellent RPGs, whileHelldivers 2 has been a surprise hit for Sony. Even just trying to keep up with the major releases has been a daunting task.

If you’re getting ready to start your Final Fantasy VII Rebirth adventure, let me offer you fair warning: it is a long game. If you’re planning to do every sidequest, minigame, and Chadley combat battle, you’ll be wandering around Gaia for 100 hours. That’s not an exaggeration; I hit credits in 73 hours and I still had a massive checklist of side content to complete.

When I reviewedSplatoon 3 in 2022, I found myself impressed by what a robust suite of content it offered at launch. It had a solid single-player campaign, great competitive multiplayer, a killer PVE mode in Salmon Run, and even a fun card minigame. All of those disparate modes meshed together perfectly to makeSplatoon 3 the kind of game you could pick away at for hundreds of hours. And with its latest DLC, called Side Order, that’s more true than ever.

Pokémon Presents | 2.27.2024

Who would have thought that 2024 would be the year of the monster-collecting game? While several have tried (and often struggled) to recapture the joys of Pokémon, this year’s Palworld is perhaps the first game that’s ever truly been able to pull it off. Granted, it did that by trading in finely tuned RPG combat for Ark-like survival crafting that makes it an entirely different game, but a win’s a win. While Palworld has broken records on Steam, its early access nature means you can hit its bottom quickly — something fans seem to be struggling with as its player count continues to drop.

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It’s become a bit of a tradition for Nintendo to drop a Direct presentation every February. That held up this year, but not in the way that some fans expected. Rather than dropping a 40-plus minute presentation highlighting upcoming first-party games, Nintendo released a more casual Partner Showcase today. The 25-minute video, which did not air live, instead highlighted upcoming third-party releases.

Throughout her illustrious career as gaming royalty, Princess Peach has been a jack-of-all-trades. She’s tossed turnips, driven karts, smashed tennis balls, and knocked the snot out of Solid Snake. Despite that impressive résumé, she’s rarely had the chance to be a leading lady outside of 2005’s Super Princess Peach. It was a polarizing release that failed to lock down the heroine’s identity. What could Peach be if she wasn’t attached to Mario?

Nintendo is set to make a bit of history withPrincess Peach: Showtime! on March 22. The upcoming Switch release gives gaming’s most iconic female character her own solo adventure for the first time since 2005’s critically dissected Super Princess Peach. It’s a dream moment for players who’ve spent the last two decades wishing Peach would get another shot as a leading lady.

After lots of rumors (and a lot of educated guessing), Nintendo will finally give players a new Direct presentation this week — just as it does almost every February. This time, however, we aren’t getting a full-scale Direct bursting with first-party news. Instead, Nintendo will host a Partner Showcase that will focus on third-party games. While that would usually be a bit underwhelming, its notable considering that Xbox just announced that four of its games are headed to other platforms.

Pong is so simple that it feels like there’s no possible way to deconstruct it. The Atari classic is already the most fundamental multiplayer game possible, stripping competition down to a game of digital catch. And yet, developer Graphite Lab has turned the entire idea of Pong on its head with its latest game: qomp2.

Have you ever stopped to think about your average deck of playing cards and what a design feat it is? Those 52 cards have kept people entertained for centuries thanks to limitless creativity. You can use them to play anything from Go Fish to King’s Cup. No matter how many times you shuffle them, there’s seemingly no bottom to the amount of games that can be dealt out.

During today’s Xbox Business Update, Sarah Bond, president of Xbox at Microsoft, reaffirmed the gaming company’s commitment to hardware. She confirmed that Xbox is already looking ahead to its next console, which she teases will be a major technical leap.

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After years of wildly incorrect predictions,Madden 24 has snapped its Super Bowl losing streak. This year’s official simulation of Super Bowl LVIII was nearly right on the money, correctly predicting a narrow win for the Kansas City Chiefs.

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The video game console market is about to see its biggest shakeup since Sega stopped producing hardware. Xbox’s Phil Spencer says that the company will share a “business update” with players next week outlining a new vision for the brand. That news comes after a month of rumors that claimed that some of Xbox’s biggest exclusives would be coming to other platforms, including PS5 and Nintendo Switch. The unconfirmed reports sent Xbox loyalists into a panic as fans brace for a possible future where Xbox just produces software instead of physical consoles.

On January 4, I received an email I had both been anticipating and dreading for months. My copy of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, one of my most anticipated games of 2024, had dropped into my inbox. Usually, that moment would give me a jolt of energy. I love critiquing games that have real substance, and I was still chewing on 2020’s unforgettable Yakuza: Like a Dragon several years later. That RPG tells a thematically rich story about an unlikely hero finding his confidence amid a quest to take on Japan’s criminal underworld.

Despite being a gamer my entire life, I’m still relatively new to the fighting game genre. I put countless hours into Super Smash Bros. Melee and Soulcalibur II as a kid, but I’ve otherwise only played series like Street Fighter casually. That means that I’ve missed decades worth of storytelling from a genre that regularly cooks up the wildest soap opera dramas available in gaming.

Islands of Insight, an open-world puzzle game by Behvaiour Interactive and Lunarch Studios, will launch on February 13. It’s coming exclusively to PC and will retail for $30. A public demo for it will be available from February 5 to February 12 on Steam.

Earlier this month, I witnessed a digital miracle. In a press briefing ahead of CES, Nvidia showed off a demo for its Ace microservice, an AI suite capable of generating fully voiced AI characters. I watched in awe as a demoist spoke to an in-game NPC through a microphone, only to have the digital character respond in real time. It was a true sci-fi feat, but there was one question: How did it learn to do that?

It’s going to be a busy year for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The subscription service is expected to get an influx of high-profile games in 2024.Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 and Avowed are leading the charge, and there’s a good chance that we’ll see a lot of Activision Blizzard games on the service soon. What’s always more exciting to me, though, are the games I’ve never heard of. Some of my favorite Game Pass titles over the year have been left-field indies that I learned about the very day they launched. Call them pleasant surprises.

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League of Legends publisher Riot Games has cut 11% of its staff, resulting in 530 layoffs. The major company restructure will see the company’s entire Riot Forge studio shut down and include cuts to theLegends of Runeterra development team.

We have our first hit video game of 2024, and it’s a shocker. The eccentric Palworld, an early access game available now on PC and Xbox Game Pass, is smashing Steam records as developer Pocketpair sells millions of copies. That’s thanks in large part thanks to its bizarre elevator pitch, which is succinctly described as “Pokémon with guns.”

Viseo game publisher 2K has revealed a ton of details on WWE 2K24, including its cover stars: Cody Rhodes, Bianca Belair, and Rhea Ripley. This year’s wrestling simulator is getting a host of new features, including a Wrestlemania-themed Showcase mode and a roster filled with legends like Andre the Giant. It launches on March 8 (with an early access release on March 5) for PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

I’m on a bit of a nostalgia kick right now. After burning out on new releases after a hectic 2023, I found a renewed love for gaming on my Nintendo DS. Games like Metroid Prime Hunters and Kirby Mass Attack brought me back to a unique era of two-screen game design brimming with innovative ideas. I’m not the only one missing that time, apparently; 2024 is already filled with DS throwbacks like Another Code: Recollection.

After a decade of perfecting the narrative-driven, action-adventure formula, PlayStation’s first-party games are tackling a new genre: the roguelike. Both God of War Ragnarök and the recently released The Last of Us Part II Remastered have their own roguelike modes that remix the core combat of their respective games into a repeatable action premise. At a quick glance, they’re very similar. Both modes have players cutting through arenas filled with enemies and grabbing new upgrades en route to a final boss battle.

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered is a strange blend. On one hand, it’s a good excuse to revisit Digital Trends’ 2020 Game of the Year selection. On the other, it’s a bizarre package filled with tone-deaf bonus modes that water down the base game’s own message on cyclical violence. Considering that it’s not as much of a “remaster” as its title implies, I wouldn’t blame most players for skipping it.

Harmonix revealed that the January 25 DLC tracks for Rock Band 4 will be the final new ones added to the game.

It was a sunny spring day in 2020, amid the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I beatThe Last of Us Part 2. As its long credits rolled, I paced around my small apartment living room unpacking what transpired. I adored the sequel’s first two acts and its multifaceted discussion of cyclical violence, but I found myself critical of its California-set finale. It seemed to backtrack on all the nuance of Ellie and Abbey’s struggle by introducing a definitively evil faction that I wouldn’t feel bad about shooting with a machine gun. It was a discordant note at the end of a symphony, but I was determined to dig below my surface and try to understand what Naughty Dog was going for. It had earned that.

Microsoft unveiled the next batch of new Xbox Game Pass titles, which are dropping between January 18 and February 8. Of the seven new titles coming to the video game subscription service over that time span, four are new games being added on the day of their release. The most noteworthy of those games is Persona 3 Reload, Atlus’ highly anticipated remake of an RPG classic.

I had never played Persona 3 until almost exactly one year ago. I remember loading up its Switch rerelease during a long, cross-country plane ride and finally digging in after years of curiosity. I adore Persona 5 and love the vibe of 4, so I figured I knew what to expect when I started my save file. I was dead wrong. The vibrant, plucky world I’d grown accustomed to shattered the first time I watched one of my characters put a gun to their head and pull the trigger.

Earlier this month, our Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley asked, "What is going on with indies at The Game Awards?" It's a question that many are still asking and one that its creator, Geoff Keighley, doesn't have concrete answers for.