Genre News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Slay the Spire 2, a sequel to the beloved roguelike deck-builder, has been revealed at the Triple-i Initiative and is launching in Early Access at some point in 2025.

While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X might dominate the gaming news spotlight, the PC continues to be one of the best gaming platforms out there. 2024 saw a variety of high-profile releases, and there’s still more to come.

A team led by the former creative director on Destiny announced Tuesday that they’re working on a new game under parent company ProbablyMonsters, the studio founded by former Bungie president and CEO Harold Ryan. That new development team is named Hidden Grove, and is working on an original “multiplayer competitive adventure game” built on Unreal Engine 5.

If you ask co-creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo about the subtitles of their FX adaptation of Shōgun, they’re going to tell you about it in depth. As they should; like with so many decisions in making Shōgun, the details are crucial.

Beat Saber is not stopping! Hip Hop has long been one of the most requested music genres and the least represented within the game, but the wait is over: the Hip Hop Mixtape is out now on Beat Saber for PS VR2 and PS VR. The track list includes some of the biggest names in Hip Hop like Snoop Dogg, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, and 2Pac, covering different eras and styles of this influential music genre.

Love crossword puzzles but don’t have all day to sit and solve a full-sized puzzle in your daily newspaper? That’s what The Mini is for!

It’s a big week for TV! By which I mean, to me, there’s a lot of bangers this week.

, from developer Shiny Shoe, is the studio's follow-up effort to the award-winning. While they're starkly different, they do exist within the same roguelike genre, and it appears that lessons learned from the previous game have colored what's available in. What's here is a remarkable roguelike that successfully captures the «one more time» gameplay that characterizes the greats, all the while captivating with metaprogression that keeps things fresh enough to warrant deeper exploration.

I don’t envy anyone who sets out to make a roguelike. The genre presents a wide range of challenges that can make or break a game. How long should a run take? What’s the right amount of challenge? How do you keep people coming back for one more run? The answer to one of those questions could be the wrong solution for the others. It’s the most delicate of digital balancing acts that only a handful of studios have down to a science.

Sports anime and manga remain one of the most popular genres, with new ones coming out every season. That doesn't mean the classics are not popular now, however, and one manga is continuing to be published more than forty years after it first debuted. After more than forty years, though, it is going to try something really new to keep fans interested, and keep the manga alive.

There's no denying Baldur's Gate 3's massive popularity, and its director of publishing, Michael Douse, has drawn comparison between it and the survival crafting game Palworld for finding success with a game that not all investors might have taken a chance on. 

Greetings, Polygon readers! April is here, and you know what that means. That’s right: There’s a slew of exciting new films coming out in theaters this month, like the sci-fi drama The Beast starring Léa Seydoux, Alex Garland’s Civil War, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, and more. All of those look great, but if you’re looking to enjoy a fantastic movie from the comfort of your home, there’s a wealth of great films to watch on streaming in April.

You'll struggle to find anyone that wasn't surprised by Baldur's Gate 3's rampant success over the past year. It's an excellent RPG and one of the most ambitious the industry has ever seen, but many assumed that its genre would have been too significant of a barrier for the game to break into the mainstream.

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

Love crossword puzzles but don’t have all day to sit and solve a full-sized puzzle in your daily newspaper? That’s what The Mini is for!

Spoiler Warning: This article features minor spoilers of an enemy which appears in a late game mission of Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion.

BattleJuice Alchemist, an action RPG that combines the isometric combat of games like Diablo and Hades with the intense one-on-one battles popularized by JRPGs, puts an intense spin on the genre formula: instead of relying on weapons gathered from the world or looted from your foes, you'll have to make all your combat tools yourself.

Sugar star Colin Farrell talks his first reaction to the script – and what made him sign on to the role.

At GDC 2024, New Zealand-based developer A44 (known for 2018's Ashen) provided an updated look at Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, its upcoming action RPG that sits between God of War and a lite, more accessible version of the Soulslike genre.

When I got the chance to review Stardew Valley for Polygon in 2016, I had no idea how huge it would become. What I found during my review period was a quiet, succinct, and engrossing game about doing chores, which didn’t feel all that genre-defining. It was a great game, and over the years I would get it on two additional platforms (Nintendo Switch and mobile), but I didn’t look at it as a “game of the decade” contender.

It’s been a long few years for Hollow Knight fans. The Metroidvania’s long-awaited sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, was announced five years ago. Since then, we’ve barely heard a peep about it outside of one high-profile trailer in 2022 that claimed it would launch within 12 months. That didn’t happen, and we’ve been in the dark ever since. Maybe it’ll surprise drop this year. Maybe we won’t see it until 2025. All we can do is wait.

Dead Cells is officially finished after seven years of support, and based on what I've seen of it so far, developer Motion Twin's next game may quickly take its place in the hearts of many fans and join the ranks of the best roguelikes. Windblown is an isometric action roguelike with support for up to three-player co-op, it's hitting PC early access later this year, and it looks like a compelling mix of modern genre staples and Dead Cells DNA.

A mysterious found footage short titled Exposure shot entirely on home security cameras has randomly appeared on YouTube, and it's the most terrifying thing we have seen today. 

Indie publisher tinyBuildannounced a brand-new game called that mixes ducks, destruction, and survival. The game was announced on April 1, and despite its bizarre concept, is not an April Fool's joke. tinyBuild is best known for its niche games like , a horror puzzle game, and a management Sim. This will be the publisher's first foray into the survival genre, and is said to be a mix of popular survival games like and .

It’s April Fools’ Day, but this post is no joke: There is a lot of new TV to watch this week. In a lot of ways it’s a showdown of tense situations — “tense,” here, being used to cover things like Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott, in the new adaptation) trying to con his way into high society, American Horror Story: Delicate’s Anna (Emma Roberts) attempting to figure what’s a real haunting and what’s in her head, Mark (Steven Yeun) trying to live up to the title of Invincible while he protects his family, or Larry David (Larry David) just trying to make it through the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm alive.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the most widely accepted authority on the English language, and is updated quarterly with revised meanings and new words as our language continues to evolve. Sometimes these words are entirely new creations, and sometimes they are words from other languages that have been adopted for common use in English. This past quarter, 23 new Japanese words were officially added to the OED, showing how much of an impact Japanese culture has even outside of Japan.

Grandia HD Collection bundles together two classic JRPG adventures from the tail-end of the genre's golden age, a series that has long since fallen by the wayside. Grandia, initially released on the SEGA Saturn, would make its way to PS1 in 1999, and its narratively unconnected but mechanically superior sequel, Grandia II, first came to Dreamcast before arriving on PS2 in 2002.

The South Park franchise has an eclectic history of genre choices, trying (and mostly failing) everything from FPS to kart racer. 2014's South Park: The Stick of Truth and its comic-book-themed follow-up redressed the balance with an excellent comedic spin on the old-school RPG. Now it takes another genre pivot, becoming the latest property to wade into a heaving pool of co-op roguelikes.

Things haven't been easy for Fullbright, the company that most famously produced Gone Home back in 2013, a slice of indie narrative heaven that won plaudits. After the excellent (but less virally successful) Tacoma in 2017, it's now back with another long-awaited game, Open Roads — except, in fact, the name Fullbright has been scrubbed from the final product after allegations of a toxic workplace culture sprung up a few years ago. The game's instead credited to the 'Open Roads Team'. Delays and slow progress have seen it slip years from its original release window, but the game is here at last: a short and sweet story-driven road trip.

When Stardew Valley first came out in 2016, it was positioned as a Harvest Moon-like. The comparison was the only way at the time to describe a low-stakes farming simulator with a village of locals to meet and perhaps marry. It’s difficult to remember that now, in an era where “cozy gaming” has taken on a life of its own and “wholesome” games have their own showcases with hundreds of thousands of viewers, but Stardew was released into a different world. And then it made this one. Its latest major content release, the 1.6 update, is a testament to the game’s longevity in the genre that it shaped.

When asked about his inspiration for Cataclismo, Game Director Vicent Ramirez has a simple reply: “Legos.”

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

A few hours into my time with Dragon’s Dogma 2, I was struck by a critical question that appeared simple, but was unusually difficult to answer. It was this: Does the combat suck?

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and prolific fantasy and science fiction authors of all time, with a devoted following that funded the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date and has pledged over $20 million on Backerkit for his latest crowdfunding effort. His expansive bibliography can make it difficult to figure out where to start if you want to jump into his many worlds and series, so we’ve put together a primer to help guide you through the Cosmere and beyond.

It is no secret that Square Enix's Mana series has impacted the JRPG genre immensely since it debuted in 1991. It's a franchise rich with deep stories and memorable combat that has stood the test of time. Despite the last mainline game releasing 18 years ago, fanfare has yet to die down, as seen with the success of the 2020 remake of Trials of Mana. The question is, can a brand new Mana game replicate the same success as a remake? If this two-hour hands-on preview is any indication of the rest of the game, then Visions of Mana's fresh take on battle and class systems not only gives it the potential to meet the success of the originals but possibly even the chance to surpass them.

Don't Nod has announced a new studio organisation structured around its three genres of predilection: RPG, narrative adventure, and action adventure.

Earlier today, developer NetEase Games revealed Marvel Rivals, their take on the hero shooter genre that Overwatch popularized, but with actual heroes. Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man and many more classic superheroes will compete in 6v6 battles across a variety of maps, duking it out to stop Doctor Doom and his 2099 counterpart from taking over the multiverse. Your typical Marvel plotline.

Helldivers 2, Arrowhead Game Studio's highly successful sequel to 2015's Helldivers, was the highest-growing title on PC and PS5 in the US and UK in February 2024.

Sony outlined all the new offerings PlayStation Plus Essential subscribers can expect in April; surprisingly, Microsoft is the company behind two of this month’s four offerings, Minecraft Legends, and the Overwatch 2 Mega Bundle.

The hot ticket for fans of cinematic thrills this April is Monkey Man, the first directorial effort from acclaimed actor Dev Patel. The marketing for the film promises exquisitely captured and well-crafted beatdowns in service of an emotionally relatable tale of avenging familial loss. Its other selling point has been the novelty of seeing Patel, an actor who has never been viewed as an “action star” by the public at large despite being an accomplished taekwondo practitioner, stepping into that role on screen for the first time.

A selection of previews for Judas, the new game from former BioShock boss Ken Levine, have just dropped, detailing a game with an ambitious, "pseudo-procedural" approach to narrative.

The Marvel multiverse is going literary.

Millennia looks takes a different approach to the passage of time and the evolution of civilisations, nations and empires, building its retelling of history around the concept of Ages. That’s far from the only difference to its peers in the 4X strategy genre, but it’s certainly one of the most distinctive, as you explore ‘what if?’ scenarios across 10,000 years of history.

If you follow video games, you probably know what a “Soulslike” is at this point. The term, used to describe action RPGs that draw heavy inspiration from punishing titles like Dark Souls, has spawned a popular subgenre whose influence can be seen in games big and small. Now, we may be getting a new mutation of that genre thanks toFlintlock: The Siege of Dawn.

Two Tencent-owned studios are reportedly creating games to rival smash-hit survival game Palworld.

Magic: the Gathering artist Fay Dalton has been accused of plagiarising art for the card Trouble in Pairs. Dalton is accused of stealing from a piece of Cyberpunk 2020 art created by Donato Giancola, who has also produced art for Magic: the Gathering.

Tomas Sala, the solo dev behind the upcoming Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, is preparing for his extremely unique take on city builders and strategy games to launch against a pair of that space's most established names.

That’s it, guys, we made it: Time for March to go out like a lamb, as the old adage says, and spring has sprung — most notably (“most” here for if you are not the type who wants to go touch literal grass) in the form of our spring preview, which forecasts some of the best TV shows, movies, books, anime, and more coming this season.

If I were to write a list of all the things that made Skyrim special, it’d be as long as The Elder Scrolls themselves. Considering that’s a massive waste of parchment, I can boil Skyrim’s magic down to one word: dragons. Few games have recaptured the thrill of Tamriel’s wyrms crashing down from the sky to interrupt an otherwise run-of-the-mill fetch quest. But I’ve got good news: that very same sense of awe, terror, and excitement fuels Dragon’s Dogma 2, a game where a towering cyclops can unexpectedly emerge from the forest’s edge, or a terrifying drake swoop down from on high, all in unscripted, emergent moments.

Toys for Bob has reportedly entered a deal with Xbox to develop a new game that's similar to its previous work.

Open-world RPGs can be anywhere from around a dozen hours long to well over 100. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is very unique, even among others in the genre, for not adhering to a lot of traditional design philosophies, such as how it handles fast travel. If anything, that will only add to your total playtime, plus there are all the optional quests to do, Vocations to try out and level up, and more if you’re a completionist. If you’re wondering if you have the time to fit Dragon’s Dogma 2 into your schedule among all the other games releasing, here’s how long you can expect this adventure to last.

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

Onmyoji ignited controversy this week by accusing MOBA Honor of Kings of copying character designs. So far in the Onmyoji and Honor of Kings Clash, the accusations centre on two characters: Onmyoji’s Susanoo and SP Susabi, versus Honor of Kings’ Da Siming and Oshimikami. Onmyoji claims that these designs bear too close a resemblance to be coincidental.

Souslikes come in all shapes and sizes, including colorful seascapes with cute crabs.

Fans of Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, make sure to mark June 18 on your calendar. On that day, you'll be able to buy a copy of Still Wakes the Deep for the PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store), the Xbox Series X|S and the PS5, though you can also play it with Game Pass for Xbox and PC. It's the latest first-person narrative horror game from The Chinese Room, the developer behind the aforementioned titles in the same genre.

Since its reveal in early January, Halo fans have been eager for more information on Halo: Flashpoint, a new miniatures game from Mantic Games. On Friday, during the annual AdeptiCon wargaming convention in Schaumburg, Illinois, the British team delivered the goods. Not only do we know what the final products will look like, both painted and unpainted, but we also know quite a lot about how it all will play.

Norwegian developer Red Thread Games (Dreamfall Chapters, Draugen) and publisher Quantic Dream have unveiled the release date of Dustborn during the Future Games Show - Spring Edition.

Ori developer Moon Studios has appeared at Future Game Show to reveal why the team is ditching the Metroidvania genre for a new action RPG. 

Without Alone in the Dark, quite simply, there is no survival horror as we know it today. Way back in 1992, when the original game led us down the haunted hallways of the Derceto mansion for the first time, the impact that ill-fated journey would have on the landscape of video games could not have been fully understood. 

It's been over three years since Riot officially started working on the long-rumored League of Legends MMO. Back then, the team was led by former Age of Empires and World of Warcraft designer Greg Street, who has since left Riot to found his own studio and start another MMO project; for more about that, head to my lengthy interview with Greg.

This week’s TV is a sort of choose-your-IP-adaptation adventure: The X-Men of the ’90s returns, complete with nostalgic animation vibes, in X-Men ’97. If you’re looking for an alternate-timeline version of a classic video game (and a kind of silly one at that), there’s the finale of Halo season 2.

The first big video game hit of 2024 was Palworld, a game everybody thought would be “Pokémon with guns” but turned out to be an open-world crafting game where you capture monsters — called “Pals” — and put them to work on your base, creating resources and tending to various areas. People came for Pokémon and stayed for the gameplay, to the tune of 19 million players reached during its initial January release period.

RuneScape's original co-creator has detailed how his newest MMO battles the grind that usually bogs the genre down, even letting players automate busywork like mining.

Poker-themed deckbuilder Balatro is finding huge success, but its creator explains that they actively avoided similar roguelikes to engineer the best game possible. 

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

RuneScape creator and Jagex founder Andrew Gower recently revealed his next MMO, Brighter Shores, which has been in the works at his new studio, Fen Research, for about 10 years. That said, it's technically seven years if you separate engine time, prototyping, and "earnest" game development.

Harley Quinn and The Joker take center stage in the new trailer for Suicide Squad Isekai.

In the wake of a successful launch that saw it win acclaim from fans of the Metroidvania genre, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is set to get even more content as part of a roadmap extending through 2024

PlayStation Plus is getting a whole load of games from across a wide variety of genres this March. The updated catalog will include NBA 2K24, Resident Evil 3, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and more. These games (and others) will become accessible to subscribers starting March 19.

No one is doing it like Sydney Sweeney, our most idiosyncratic young movie star. Riding rising fame from The White Lotus and Euphoria, her true star turn technically started at the end of 2023 with the release of Anyone but You, a raunchy throwback rom-com that turned into a massive box-office hit. After that she starred in the awful and derided Madame Web, but managed to come out the other side not just unscathed but brushing it off with A-list energy, joking about the movie’s failure on Saturday Night Live mere weeks after it opened. Her next big win is Immaculate, a weird, fascinating, and extremely fun new horror movie that’s coming to theaters later in March.

After spending years under the working title of Project L, Riot Games’ expansion into the fighting game genre has officially been dubbed2XKO. Hailing from the makers of the massively popular League of Legends, this fighter will feature a cast pulled right from that MOBA, but now using far different mechanics. This genre was once notorious for how hard it was for newcomers to get into, but recent examples like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 have proven that it is possible to make the genre accessible to more players. Considering the popularity of the source material here, and the fact that it will be free to play, we expect a lot of players who normally don’t touch fighters to at least be curious. Whoever you are, let’s start at round one and go over everything we know so far about 2XKO.

Contra has had a rough time of it over the last few years. Once heralded as the greatest of all the run ‘n’ guns, the series started to fall apart in the noughties and hit rock bottom with the critically panned Contra: Rogue Corps in 2019. Now, in the safe hands of the side-scroller maestros at WayForward, can Contra: Operation Galuga reclaim the battered franchise’s once-adoring fanbase?

PlayStation Plus has undergone several iterations and changes since its introduction. Originally, the service wasn’t required for online play at all and rewarded subscribers with extra discounts and free monthly games. Once the PlayStation 4 generation began, it was required for online play but still offered those same benefits.

As the Xbox Game Pass program has grown, so has our list of the best games on Xbox Game Pass. After the launch of the Xbox Series X, Microsoft has doubled down on Game Pass, now offering well over 350 games on the console alone. To help you through option paralysis, we rounded up the top games on Microsoft’s subscription platform.

When I grappled to the roof of a building using my hook, I felt like I’d played Rise of the Ronin before. That’s not a bad thing; I’ve played many of Team Ninja’s previous games, but it felt oddly familiar, in a bloody comforting way.

There’s plenty of genuinely good ongoing TV to watch this week: Shōgun continues apace (with new episodes dropping on Tuesdays), Abbott Elementary is still making its way through the school year (Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST), and The Gentlemen is all on Netflix, but hey, maybe you’re still working your way through it! But that doesn’t mean there’s not new TV coming this week — and more good TV coming fresh to a screen near you.