PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium’s monthly games have been typically revealed and then delivered all at once – this was still true in May – but June’s selection of titles has introduced a major change with gradual rollouts stretched across a few weeks.
Push Square detailed what’s going down this month, pointing out it’s not just the United States and the United Kingdom facing these changes; Japan is also getting a staggered release model moving forward that lines up with how Xbox Game Pass handles things each month.
It’s easy to see how a staggered release schedule can be annoying and confusing for players who get all excited following the announcements of new arrivals, and subscribers have been quite vocal about it so far. The biggest example is r/PlayStationPlus’ monthly “PS+ Criticism Thread”, which is unsurprisingly full of scathing comments.
“Maybe they thought it would keep interest in the service going but honestly it just kills hype if the game you’re looking forward to doesn’t become available until June 30,” one user explained after another one simply stated he didn’t like how PlayStation had handled June’s game drops.
Other subscribers took things a step further, elaborating on why Sony might be doing this and why it feels so anti-consumer: “The staggered release dates is the most anti-consumer thing of all time, if your sub is expiring, you are short changed. I can also see this having a knock on effect of titles being pulled back in volume even further.” Some replies to this post support the observation and underline it all feels intentional in a bad way.
Less upvoted posts also signal a general discontent with the changes, which could still be rolled back after this wave of negative feedback for all we know, but it seems some users are ready to move on if PS Plus prices continue to go up as the service worsens.
Rhythm Heaven isn’t Nintendo’s best-known series, nor its most prolific. Prior to the launch of Rhythm Heaven Groove on the Switch this week — it’s out on July 2nd — there were only four previous entries, one of which was exclusive to Japan. The most recent came out more than a decade ago. Even still, there’s a case to be made that this is Nintendo’s most consistent franchise. There are few guarantees in life, but a new Rhythm Heaven being great is one of them.
If you’re unfamiliar, Rhythm Heaven is sort of like a music-focused version of WarioWare. That means it’s a collection of short and bizarre minigames, except these ones all test your sense of, well, rhythm. In Groove, for instance, there’s a stage where you’re controlling a car’s brakes and gas, and another has you helping a crab throw macarons. But all of these actions need to be done on beat. Most of the levels seem simple, given that they usually only require one or two different buttons, but keeping the rhythm can be a challenge.
What makes the games work is a combination of great, catchy music — the series is produced by Japanese singer-songwriter Tsunku — and weirdo minigames. Groove’s levels will have you doing everything from avoiding a sneezing moon to chopping vegetables to serving as a background dancer during a J-pop concert. I always find myself tapping and singing along to help get myself into the right mindset. Even now as I write this, the beeping track from the car level is stuck in my head.
Groove may be the first new Rhythm Heaven title in quite some time, but it’s not some kind of drastic reinvention of the formula. The structure remains largely the same: you slowly unlock levels, and they get progressively more challenging. Each level is grouped into a series of four, and when you complete all of those you’re presented with a remix stage that blends all of them together. These can be particularly tough as they force you to jump back and forth between actions while dealing with an ever-changing beat. This generally works well, though the structure can be a little restrictive. If you ever find yourself really struggling with a level — it took me forever to get the hang of a can-smashing minigame — you can’t progress until you figure it out.
That said, Groove does offer some things to do outside of the main levels for those times when you’re stuck. There are musical toys you can play around with, which include bouncing a puffer fish on a tennis racket, along with a miniature musical RPG called Beatspell where you hit buttons to the beat to perform spells. I particularly enjoyed the RPG — I wish it was longer — but these modes do require progressing through the main game to unlock them. Eventually, I had to suck it up and learn to smash those cans.
My biggest issue with Groove is that when playing on my TV, no matter which controllers I used, there was a slight delay for button presses. The game does allow you to calibrate your controllers with the TV to try and address this, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get things to work properly. It may sound like a small detail, but any delay, no matter how slight, makes a huge difference in a rhythm game. I kept regularly failing levels I could beat handily in handheld mode, where the game worked perfectly fine for me.
Hopefully the TV issue gets fixed in a future update. Otherwise, Groove, like the rest of Rhythm Heaven series, is a near-perfect collection of bite-sized rhythm action. I always think of these games like albums, and Groove is a familiar yet new offering from one of my favorite bands.
As Rockstar employees move to pursue official union recognition following a series of high-profile sackings in 2025, new allegations are emerging related to Rockstar’s treatment of its staff. In a new report published by Game Developer, multiple Rockstar developers have accused the company of failing to address gender-based pay inequity, actively pursuing and facilitating crunch culture in its United Kingdom-based offices, and weaponising bonus payments against employees.
In a massive interview over at Game Developer, three members of the Rockstar Game Workers Union revealed various details about how the company allegedly treats its employees. The participants in the interview, who have each chosen to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, suggest that Rockstar is systematically failing the staff working on the year’s most hyped and anticipated video game release: GTA 6.
Firstly, the staff believe bonuses are being used as a means to control and manipulate staff: “When the bonus is particularly good, it can be a windfall, but often the bonus is disappointing and one can end up being paid considerably less than expected for the year,” reported one employee. “The reasoning given for this is often nebulous, inconsistent between departments, even inconsistent between team members within the same department 388win, and sometimes hinges on completely subjective or retroactive criticisms.”
Another source said: “Employees want good pay, and if literally anything they do that year could affect it, they will naturally feel they have to be as pliable as possible to their boss’s whims. Imagine [how you might feel if] a fifth of your salary could be withheld without any justification or based on a single surprise factor.”
Secondly, staff report the gap between median wages for different genders has widened at Rockstar in recent years (typically, in the UK, the gender pay gap is trending towards being narrower – though there’s still plenty of room for improvement across the board).
Finally, the staff interviewed by the site all alledge that crunch culture is alive and well at the studio – and to such a degree that overtime practices are baked into staff contracts. This, of course, is not the first time we’ve heard such accustations against Rockstar. “Crunch is prevalent enough that the company built into our contracts, as standard, an opt out of the Working Time Regulations that stops your employer being able to ask you to do more than about 10 hours extra each week,” explained one of the interviewees. Paired with an enforced office work mandate and unfulfilled promises regarding remote work (a point of contention for union members), there’s a distinct feeling amongst workers that Rockstar is taking advantage of its staff.
It is worth noting that each of the interviewees in the Game Developer piece are not part of the cohort of staff fired by Rockstar in 2025 as part of an alleged ‘union-busting’ effort, but are union members currently seeking voluntary recognition by Rockstar.
As unionisation efforts continue, it appears Rockstar staff are benefitting from the public attention and support the movement has garnered since the 2025 sackings. “Since October, there have been unprecedented average wage increases in represented studios, for the first time ever there is actually some financial incentive for crunch, and several other policies are changing after years of frustration,” one source told Game Developer. “The timing is not coincidental – organising works.”
Take-Two offered a statement to Game Developer regarding the statements of the staff. “We have received a request from a union seeking to discuss voluntary recognition,” read an excerpt. “We value an open and constructive dialogue with all stakeholders and will arrange to meet.” The full story over on Game Developer is well worth reading, and provides more context to these points.
Over the past decade, an impression has taken root among gamers that any real creativity and originality in the industry is to be found in the indie, rather than mainstream, sector. Gareth Damian Martin can claim some responsibility for that. Their first game, 2020’s In Other Waters, merged sci-fi and underwater xenobiology in a uniquely calming and thought-provoking manner, while Citizen Sleeper (2022) and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025) were full-blown sci-fi epics with ultraminimal aesthetics and a rare intelligence.
Martin has broken with tradition by unveiling their next game, Signet City, far in advance of its 2027 launch. Set in a dystopian monochrome city, it’s a narrative role-playing adventure with a curious first-person perspective. “You play as a parasite,” says Martin. “And it felt natural that it should be a game where you see the world through the eyes of your hosts, very literally. You wake up in the mind of a person called Sid at the same time as she’s waking up in the river of a city. You’re coming to understand what you are, why it is that you’re in the mind of this person who doesn’t know that you’re there, along with what your capabilities are, and what the world is, through Sid.”
‘A city in the middle of multiple overlapping crises’ … Signet City. Photograph: Jump Over the Age/Fellow Traveller
From here, you slowly discover what your bigger objective is, but, Martin says, it’s still very much the story of a city that’s in the middle of multiple overlapping crises, with all the characters providing flashpoints for that. Their inspiration comes from novels featuring multi-perspective stories about cities, where readers jump around into different characters – Perdido Street Station by China Miéville or Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books.
Gameplay-wise it sounds like the classic Gareth Damian Martin elements are present, such as tabletop-style use of dice. “Each time you drop into the mind of a host – and you have multiple hosts that you’re moving between, depending on what you’re trying to do – their part of the city comes with them,” says Martin. “If this person is working in, let’s say, the algae burners, then that’s also your environment, and that’s what you’ll be exploring and finding characters around and in.”
The look of Signet City is inspired by British photographer Tish Murtha. Photograph: Jump Over the Age/Fellow Traveller
Players have a limited amount of actions a day. “You have objectives as a parasite – bigger objectives about growing and becoming more powerful and how you want to influence the city,” says Martin. “But each of the hosts will also have things that they are supposed to be doing, and their own emotional storyline. There’s a dice-based tabletop element to it, governing actions you can find in the world, and those are affected by the emotions of the host.”
You might get a host into an argument in a pub which then angers them, for example, making it easier for them to kick down a door. “There’s a kind of lock-and-key element, but also a skill-based system that’s about you adjusting modifiers by making narrative decisions,” says Martin. “I want to make games where the narrative element and mechanical elements are not separable.”
Martin reveals that the striking monochrome style also meshes with one of their areas of obsession: “I had this very particular vision of wanting to have hand-drawn characters that are in my natural art style, but then to balance that with a photographic environment. I love the way that in black and white photography you get imaginary detail that’s created from grain. So in the in-game visual, we have a complex post-processing effect. The game is very much inspired by 80s social photography, especially by Tish Murtha – I absolutely love her photographs.”
As for Signet City itself, we can expect sci-fi aspects to be blended with elements of 1980s northern English city life. “I’m trying to dig into this idea of a city as a living structure – not just as a space that contains people, but also contains ecology and different animals, and layers of systems that are overlapping with each other. But also I wanted to make something that drew more on British history and culture, and what I was born into, and the 80s – and fascinating events like the winter of discontent – cast a long shadow over the contemporary day.”
If you like your sci-fi warped through a black and white lens of 80s social realism, Signet City promises an utterly unique gaming experience.
Hello! Eurogamer’s week of features celebrating the intersection of queer culture and gaming continues today as Kaan Serin explores how the acclaimed Haven found new meaning when it introduced the option to gender swap its leads two years after launch. To catch up on everything you might have missed this year and in Pride Weeks past, you can visit our Pride Week hub.
There’s a scene in The Game Bakers’ 2020 RPG adventure Haven where our central couple, Kay and Yu, begin repairing their spaceship/mobile home after it’s tragically battered in an earthquake on an alien planet. As they replace its left wing, its right wing, then the engine hood and beyond, the couple start to wonder: at what point is their Nest not their Nest? If all the ship’s various appendages and knobs and metal plates get swapped out, is it still the same Nest assembled in a factory someplace, sometime ago? It’s the sci-fi Ship of Theseus.
Two years after Haven’s release, The Game Bakers inadvertently flipped that same question back onto its two protagonists with the Couples Update, letting players gender swap either one. Suddenly, Kay and Yu – straight in the original telling – could be a lesbian couple (with the original Yu now paired with a female version of Kay), a gay couple (featuring Kay and an alt-version of Yu), or remain as they always were. In other words, it turned its straight game gay.
Here’s a trailer for Haven’s Couples Update.Watch on YouTube
So back to the sci-fi Ship of Theseus. The Couples Update doesn’t alter what happens in Haven or how you play it – mechanical and narrative changes are nearly non-existent – but in swapping out a few pieces, can it alter what Haven means? Has the old become something new? Yes, I think; replacing the protagonists’ genders transforms how the game is understood. It’s not brute-forcing queerness into an otherwise heteronormative game, rather the added representation is forcing us to reinterpret the game itself. On paper, nothing material really changes when doing a queer playthrough. Most of the dialogue is unaltered outside of pronoun tweaks here and there. The story and combat remain exactly the same. The only things different are the character models, voice acting, and in-game menu illustrations.
Image credit: Eurogamer/The Game Bakers
But while much of Haven remains intact, the game fits into a queer reading like a fish in water because even before the Couples Update, it was already concerned with problems that shape LGBTQIA+ lives every day, even if they weren’t explicitly framed through a queer lens. There’s the policing of love, the pressure to conform, the fighting of alien mushroom-growing lizards… wait, no, that’s a game-exclusive problem. Haven, in all its permutations, is a game about a couple on the run from an authoritarian society that forces its population into arranged marriages with whoever it chooses. To stay together, to escape the Matchmaker’s decree, Kay and Yu must abandon their entire lives and everyone else they’ve ever met or ever will.
A regime that fights to stop people from loving who they choose, potentially even erasing their memories, obviously invites queer interpretations by itself. Many in the LGBTQIA+ community still experience a similar oppression (and it’s notable it’s being enforced by one of the character’s parents here, too), so inserting an actual queer couple into the mix only highlights the already queer-coded narrative on screen.
Image credit: Eurogamer/The Game Bakers
In that sense, Haven very elegantly queers itself without much additional work. Kay and Yu are two people who potentially face death for the crime of simply being together, and every in-game day they spend exploring the archipelago of floating islets that serves as Haven’s setting – skinny dipping in fountains, cooking using alien produce, holding hands outside, and playing made-up choose-your-own-adventure games – is a dangerous act of resistance.
During my very gay second playthrough of Haven, my male Kay was destined to be shovelled into a blind, life-long soulmateage with a woman, while a lesbian run flips the roles with a female Yu being the one forced into a heterosexual relationship. In the game’s ‘bad’ ending, gay Kay is ripped from Yu so he can unhappily spend his life with someone of the opposite sex. Some memory alteration is also implied, a practice the characters say was originally invented to remove short traumatic moments in someone’s life during therapy before it was eventually weaponised by the regime against our couple. Without having to lift so much as a finger, a queer run of Haven arguably draws connections to real-world conversion therapy.
Image credit: Eurogamer/The Game Bakers
And while the game doesn’t outright explore the subject, I imagine polyamorous and asexual folks probably don’t fare very well in a system where an algorithm seemingly chucks them into the arms of a potentially unwilling mate forever.
Admittedly, slapping queer theory onto an originally hetero-led game does have its limits and can feel like trying to push a square block into a triangular hole. Because, imagine this, it’s suggested Haven’s authoritarian sci-fi state isn’t totally gay-averse. My Yu mentions he has “mothers”, for one, and a knock-on effect of the Couples Update means he’s canonically betrothed to another man. The regime’s enigmatic Matchmaker isn’t strictly homophobic, then, but it seemingly doesn’t take into consideration one’s sexuality while leashing two strangers together. The world Haven sets up leaves big questions when looked at as a game specifically about queer experiences – and those questions don’t always have comfortable answers – but it still invites some fascinating readings.
Image credit: Eurogamer/The Game Bakers
Which brings us back to the sci-fi Ship of Theseus once more. At what point are Kay and Yu not Kay and Yu anymore? Does swapping their pronouns, their voices, their builds and their implied genitalia fundamentally change what these characters stand for? What about Haven? Does the game itself take on a different form with queer characters in the spotlight? Is it more explicitly about one thing or another simply by virtue of having queer protagonists? Haven remains the same on a fundamental level, I think, but adopts an even sadder meaning by connecting the dots between its fictional oppressive systems and our real-world ones.
Not every game can open itself up to queer re-evaluation years after the fact like this (I’m not totally convinced Portal would suddenly take on a different meaning if Chell and GLaDOS started smooching, for instance, but Master Chief’s fight against a zealous religious army in Halo might if he was a little fruitier). But the Couples Update works miraculously well in retroactively queering Haven because those queer-coded ideas already existed and easily bubble up to the surface when looking at it through a different character’s slightly gayer lens. It might not be a game originally built with foregrounded queer characters, but its themes of forbidden love and oppressive societies enter it into the canon of great gaymes pretty seamlessly.
Hello! Eurogamer’s week of features celebrating the intersection of queer culture and gaming continues today as Khee Hoon Chan investigates the concept of queer time and how it’s being explored in video games. To catch up on everything you might have missed this year and in Pride Weeks past, you can visit our Pride Week hub.
Time functions differently depending on where, and who, you are. Having grown up in Singapore, I’m familiar with the country’s rigid, albeit implicit, timeline of meeting major milestones: dating in our teenhood, settling into our first respectable career by 25, getting married before our 30s, and purchasing our first home before 35. But many queer folk, like myself, live to a different temporal rhythm.
Queerphobia is deeply institutionalised. Queer education is scant, even inaccurate, while anti-discrimination laws for queer people, when and where they exist, are often inadequate; we can even be denied opportunities due to who we are. As a result, we often come to terms with our identities, and realise our coming of age experiences, at a delayed pace. The concept of being at the “right” age to meet these milestones isn’t just tenuous, it’s out of reach for many of us.
Of course, the specific markers of such chrononormativity – the idea our lives should follow an unwritten, yet arbitrary order – will most likely differ across cultures. But the reality that queer people rarely experience time in this prescribed, heteronormative way is universal. And while we live outside this linearity, we are also increasingly resisting it, choosing to live our lives at our own pace, at our own time. We are queering time by bending it to our whims.
Here’s a trailer for If Found…Watch on YouTube
As games mature, they also increasingly explore more diverse perspectives in creative ways. And as queer representation becomes more multifaceted and authentic, notions of queer time have found their way into the medium too. Perhaps no other game better encapsulates this theory than Don’t Nod’s Life is Strange, whose queer teenage protagonist Max has the literal ability to manipulate time. In the first game, Max can reverse and fast-forward time to avoid certain consequences, allowing her to revisit conversations with the school principal and tweak her responses, say, or to prevent a classmate from getting injured by warning her in advance.
But one of the most consequential uses of Max’s time-altering abilities involves her best friend and love interest Chloe. Early on in the original Life is Strange, Max saves Chloe’s life by rewinding time and preventing another student from shooting her. And then she saves her life again and again as the story goes on: rewinding time when Chloe accidentally shoots herself in Episode 2, and when she gets her foot stuck in the tracks as a train is approaching.
Image credit: Don’t Nod
Beyond its literal effects, Max’s power also has a metaphorical bent, which manifests from a yearning to spend more time with a childhood friend she’s lost touch with. It’s a familiar sentiment for queer people who may feel like they are out of time; we often feel like our lives can only properly begin when we start to accept our own identity. Queerphobia tends to exacerbate this, since we spend so much of our youth grappling with who we are. And like the debilitating effects of queerphobia, the incessant disasters that befall Max and Chloe – and their home of Arcadia Bay – constantly threaten to pull them apart, shortening their time together.
But Life is Strange is far from the only game to explore queer identity through the concept of time. Developer Dreamfeel’s acclaimed visual novel If Found, for instance, centres on the experiences of a trans woman Kasio. Having graduated from a Dublin college, Kasio returns home to a disapproving family: her mother frames her identity as a woman as a phase, an “alternative thing” she should snap out of. And her brother spews caustic, transphobic diatribes. This tale is interspersed with a second story about a black hole that threatens to swallow the Earth, and the astronaut who’s trying to save the planet from catastrophe.
Image credit: Dreamfeel
Kasio’s experiences are the epitome of displaced time that many queer people go through. Her mother frequently tells her she needs to “get over” her new identity, marry a woman, and settle down. Kasio rejects a friend with an unrequited crush because she’s still figuring out her identity. When she visits home, Kasio realises her own room doesn’t feel like her own because of the constant changes she has to make to her space for visiting guests. Her identity is inextricably tethered to temporality.
The game’s sci-fi subplot amplifies the emotional stakes, with a reveal that places Kasio at the heart of this earth-rending disaster. And when her emotional collapse culminates with the lines, “Time doesn’t exist in a black hole. Every moment crushed together, past and present and future, in one endless scream,” it’s another example of how damaging hegemonic constructions of time have been for Kasio. Like gender and race, time is a social construct built from a series of agreed upon conventions.
Queer time, too, can explain the sense of isolation many queer people experience, as our peers achieve key milestones ahead of us – and this is something affectingly reflected in developer Gritfish’s Killing Time At Light Speed, a visual novel set in a not-so-distant future where interstellar travel is possible. As Jay, you are travelling to another inhabited planet, but time unfolds at a different cadence; even though the journey spans 29 years on Earth, the trip only takes half an hour from the perspective of Jay.
Image credit: Gritfish
In-game, players experience the journey entirely through the ship’s predominantly text-based interface. Fortunately, the wonders of technology mean you can read the latest news and remain in touch with friends from Earth via the social media platform FriendPage. Unfortunately, the differences in the passing of time mean that, for every refresh of the page, a year has gone by at home. From lightyears away, you’re seeing your queer friends get attached, married, and have kids. You can leave a comment, but your friends will only see it much later, and there’s increasingly little way to respond and engage with them meaningfully.
Eventually they leave FriendPage for another, more relevant social media platform – one you have no access to. And the feeling of being left behind, as Killing Time At Light Speed reaches its ultimately desolate ending and Jay arrives at their destination alone, exemplifies queer loneliness as interpreted through the lens of queer time.
Image credit: Anna Anthropy
Conversely, Anna Anthropy’s hypertext game Queers In Love At The End Of The World reduces each playthrough to a mere ten seconds, presenting an alternate perception of time. Set in an unknown apocalypse, you only have a fleeting moment to interact with your partner one last time, forcing you to make decisions in split seconds. Life’s conventional markers are all but erased here; the linear, heteronormative progression of time is instead replaced by a cyclical, queer one. You click through the different text options and relive multiple ten-seconds cycles, all to discover more about the last two people in this world.
It’s perhaps notable these games are tinged with an apocalyptic element where time is becoming a scarce resource, and their protagonists must reckon with their ephemeral circumstances. The concept of queer temporality emerged, after all, with the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when the contours of time were reshaped for many in the queer community; 324,029 men and women died of AIDS-related illnesses between 1987 and 1998 in the USA alone. Queer time is thus foregrounded as a liberatory expression in games, one that can help queer individuals like myself explore, interrogate, and reinvent our very relationship with – and against – the passing of time, and of life’s myriad milestones.
Undead Labs, the team behind the State of Decay series, was revealed to be among the Microsoft-owned studios under threat of closure. Undead Labs is currently working on survival shooter and management sim State of Decay 3, and the game was part of the Xbox Showcase earlier this month.
The information comes from GamesBeat, which names the studio alongside Double Fine, Compulsion, and Ninja Theory as all being studios that Microsoft could close. While we’ve known about the other three, this is the first time Undead Labs has been revealed to be at risk of closure as Microsoft seeks to ‘reset’ the Xbox brand.
Should Microsoft fail to find buyers for these studios, according to the report, hundreds of jobs could be lost. That’s 110 jobs for Undead Labs, 100 jobs for Double Fine, 90 jobs for Compulsion, and 135 for Ninja Theory. Indeed, it’s also possible for some of those studios to regain their independence and buy themselves out from Xbox.
Watch on YouTube
Members of those studios represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) held a press conference to call out the impending layoffs. The union, which now represents over 3,500 people at Microsoft, said those workers “will not be traded as disposable.”
The news is particularly shocking, and would make Undead Labs the second studio to have an in-development, publicly announced game set for release next year to be at risk of closure, the other being Ninja Theory with Senua.
This might explain why more State of Decay 3 gameplay footage has been coming out recently. The initial showing earlier this month was limited, and we didn’t expect another look at gameplay for a while. Despite that, more footage has been popping up since, after Undead Labs allowed content creators to share gameplay from recent testing sessions.
Image credit: Undead Labs, Xbox.
The pending layoffs and studio closures are expected to begin in early July, following the end of Microsoft’s financial quarter. Already, we’ve seen members of those studios let go, with at least a dozen recently announcing their departure from Compulsion Games.
New CEO Asha Sharma’s big ‘reset’ plan is expected to include multiple layoffs and studio closures across the entire Xbox division, in an effort to make it profitable. Microsoft has not publicly discussed any of the following reports.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is an impressive piece of hardware we mostly love, but some players have complained over time about its LCD screen’s shortcomings. Now, we’ve learned some changes could be coming soon with a subtle redesign of its panel.
Via Nintendo Everything, visual evidence from a Chinese resale site has surfaced, with a very recent listing revealing Japanese electronics company Sharp could be behind the new screen. Currently, the Switch 2 has a panel built by Taiwan-based display manufacturer InnoLux.
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Nintendo Switch 2 – Official Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
“This new screen has a different circuit, connector, and cables. Everything here points to an updated redesign as opposed to a small revision,” Nintendo Everything’s report states before also pointing out Sharp had recently reported “expanded sales for mobile […] applications” last year, from September 2025 onward.
Nintendo Patents Watch on Bluesky also shared its thoughts on the leaked images, confirming “the exposed circuit, connector, and cables are significantly different”, which might signal it’s far from a minor revision. It added the first LCD panel from InnoLux already used low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) glass from Sharp, so a potential quality improvement on that front is unclear. The new internal components are a different story, though.
Many fans and tech enthusiasts are hoping for an upgrade which deals with the LCD screen’s poor response times, which can lead to blurry visuals in fast motion when playing in handheld mode. Personally, I think it may not be noticeable if you mostly use the console as a handheld, but if you move between different screens (including older portable devices), these problems become more evident.
Nintendo is also set to launch a new Switch 2 model in Europe that allows owners to replace the battery in order to comply with new European directives and regulations. Will these two variations come together in one, dedicated European SKU, or will multiple new versions of the console hit the market? Nintendo has yet to comment.
The word going around Summer Game Fest this year was that Stranger Than Heaven was tougher than nails. And having played it I can confirm that it is. Until it isn’t. Stranger Than Heaven is frightfully hard to get your head around for the first few minutes, particularly as this demo was essentially just a case of being dropped into three bouts of increasing challenge with only a quick video tutorial first. But once you unlearn a few habits and learn to think the way it wants you to, it’s less difficult than it is just plain interesting.
Stranger Than Heaven
Developer: RGG Studio
Publisher: Sega
Played on: Xbox
Availability: Out 15th January 2027 on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Combat was the entire focus of this demo – no utterly bizarre Snoop Dog or Tupac cameos here I’m afraid – and so let’s go over exactly how this combat system works.
The crux of it is in a unique mapping of left and right limbs to left and right bumpers and triggers. Left bumper swings a punch (or held weapon) with your left hand; left trigger a kick with your left leg, and the right side the same again. One-handed weapons such as a knife are only used by the hand holding them – so you can shank and slash with your right hand knife and quickly land a jab with your left first, for instance. Two-handed weapons work with either, though you swing in different directions.
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Here’s a Stranger Than Heaven trailer to show it in action.Watch on YouTube
That’s important, because blocking is also an unusual system. Rather than a single bumper – typically the left one in most weapon-based combat games – blocking here is mapped to B/Circle on the controller. Holding it down will block most attacks, but holding it down and then pressing the bumper on either side will do a directional block in the respective direction, allowing you to parry. Holding any attack button down, meanwhile, allows you to ‘charge’ it, even the seemingly lighter attacks you throw with your hands, while you can also perform a grab by doing two equivalent buttons at once. Likewise, foes will occasionally get bludgeoned sufficiently enough for you to leap onto them and do a bit of pummeling while they’re on the ground. (Stranger Than Heaven can be brutal. That’s maybe as you’d maybe expect from Yakuza/Like A Dragon developer Ryu Ga Gokotu – and for a game that’s also a distant Like A Dragon prequel – but this one feels especially, ahem, punchy.)
The difficulty, certainly at first, comes from simply wrapping your head around the two systems of offense and defense. It’s incredibly easy to slip into just attacking with one hand and leg, for instance, until the enemy susses you out and starts to continuously block those attacks. Likewise, unlearning your use of the shoulder buttons for parrying took me a good few minutes, while properly clicking with the block + parry combo took me most of the demo.
Image credit: RGG / Sega
As for the demo itself, this one played out over three small extracts of three separate locations. The first was Kokura, Fukuoka, set in 1915, and classed as beginner-friendly. Friendly is a stretch: this was still a bout with multiple enemies from the off, but it made for a nice showcase of how booting one baddie into another can send them all tumbling enjoyably, like angry little skittles. Plus there were a good few bottles lying around on tables, adding a fun additional dimension (that dimension being: what if I hit this guy with a bottle?).
The next was a larger group of enemies at an intermediate challenge – with an added, hulking brute for good measure – set in 1929’s Kure, Hiroshima. This was a good test of one of the weapons, a large crowbar, that helped as you’d expect with clearing out groups while parrying some of the big fella’s non-heavy attacks.
There was some clumsiness here at times, though it was often hard to tell what was my clumsiness and what was Stranger Than Heaven’s. An example: it’s very easy to whiff an attack entirely here, with no lock-on available. Sometimes that works nicely, as you dodge around the area, or an enemy successfully evades you – often not with a specific dodge move itself but just by virtue of the two of you both engaging in a kind of positional dance. Stranger Than Heaven is a game of timing and anticipation as much as it is mechanical skill. But other times it does have the effect of making you both look rather ridiculous, as an enemy locks themselves into several air punches or you throw a furious kick at thin air, as though the wind had whispered something nasty about your mother.
Image credit: RGG / Sega
The final bout was a kind of boss fight, in a 1v1 against a scrawny little rake of a man with a sword. Again the timeline moved forward, this time to 194’s Minami, Osaka. Here I had several weapons unlocked, though stuck with the default knife as it felt perfectly suited. This was also by far the most enjoyable bout of the lot. Skinny man mixed naturalistic fighting with the odd burst of impossible speed, namely via an attack where he’d crouch a little, prepare his blade, then suddenly burst forward across most of the width of the arena in a millisecond flash.
What it became was a game of anticipation again, as he seemed to genuinely adapt to my strategies on the fly. A left bumper attack for instance, with my empty fist, proved incredibly useful as a quick jab to interrupt his marginally slower attacks, as long as I stayed right up close. But then – maybe after his health hit a certain threshold, which would make sense, and be a bit more standard for combat games like this – he started to parry them, forcing me to reconfigure a plan on the fly. I got a couple grabs in through that guard instead, for instance, and focused harder on parrying. That, combined with cracking the timing of his almost-unblockable dash attack got me to a final breakthrough where I could finish him off.
In one sense, all this is nothing too new – a few group bust-ups and a tougher guy to fight. But throughout the whole demo this combat system had me grinning. Only earlier that weekend – that day in fact – after a lot of time spent dodging, parrying, and quick-or-heavy attacking across various games, I had genuinely been wondering why nobody had ever tried mapping attacks to limbs (at least in the third-person action genre; the likes of Tekken have been doing something somewhat similar of their own for a while). It’s been standard for some time for a controller to have four shoulder buttons, for instance, why not stick an arm or a leg on each one?
Well, Stranger Than Heaven offers a good answer. Because it is weird, like trying to play Sekiro with the controls of QWOP. And because doing anything remotely weird in video games, particularly today, is a massive gamble. Combat controls have become largely standardised for a reason – because dodge, parry, heavy and light attacks are a classic formula. But like any good remix of a classic, you will get a lot more out of it if you play it with an open mind. This is one of the most interesting combat systems I’ve played in a long, long time – the rhythmic, almost musical timing-based duelling of Sekiro, in fact, is probably the last time I had to do a bit of active re-wiring on the fly – and the results from this brief early impression are positive. I think this is a gamble that’s paid off.
Sony has seemingly begun setting expectations for how it plans to handle pricing of its PlayStation hardware going forward. The platform holder has revealed that it does not intend on taking significant hits to profits to absorb some of the ballooning costs of manufacturing hardware.
Sony executives recently held a Q&A session to discuss the company’s Game & Network Services division. The Q&A, which Sony published in English, featured commentary by Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino.
Nishino was asked about the company’s stance on hardware pricing and profitability, particularly when it comes to the next generation of PlayStation.
Image credit: Eurogamer
“First, we regard hardware as the base for providing the gaming experience, and by offering products such as the PlayStation Portal Remote Player (PS Portal), we aim to provide experiences tailored to users’ play styles beyond the living room, which has traditionally been considered the primary usage environment,” Nishino began. “As for pricing, it is not realistic for us to absorb all component cost increases, and we have already implemented some price increases outside Japan.”
Indeed, Sony has raised the price of its PlayStation 5 line-up multiple times since its launch in November 2020, with the most recent hike in March. To that end, Nishino revealed that “we do not believe this has led to a decline in customer demand.”
The comment on sales and consumer demand is particularly interesting, as recent data has shown that PS5 hardware sales in the US have reached their lowest point for Sony since May 2000, and suffered a 58 percent decline year-on-year. In the UK, PS5 hardware sales fell sharply during the same month, almost enough for primary competitor, Xbox, to catch up.
Image credit: Sony
So, can we expect more price hikes? The executive didn’t offer a clear answer, but he did intimate that the days of subsidised console hardware are over.
“As a principle, we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses,” he said. “At the same time, we are carefully monitoring the market and continuing to evaluate our approach. We believe it is important for us to make every effort to ensure that customers fully understand the value we provide in relation to pricing.”
Sony has only briefly addressed its next-generation PlayStation in the past. The company’s official stance has thus far been that it has not yet decided on a price or on when the console is going to launch.
Nishino’s comments, however, indicate that we should expect a very expensive PS6. Just this week, a reliable insider said the cost to build a single PS6 console has risen to be around $960, based on its components alone. This is the result of the AI-driven hunger for high-speed memory and storage, which has multiplied their prices and forced consumer electronic manufacturers to raise their own prices in turn.
