Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds is still talking internally about what to do in response to the game’s big killing fish debate, but players have taken the matter into their own hands, diving deeper to uncover ways of actually defending themselves.

To briefly recap, killing fish isn’t properly supported in Subnautica 2, which launched to huge success in early access form last week. You can deter fish by using a flare, but there are no tools designed specifically for causing fish damage, which means that you’re faced with having to put up with them nibbling at your heels as you go about your underwater business.

But, it turns out that there are ways to defend yourself in Subnautica 2, but you’ll have to put in a bit of work to make use of them. Across subreddits, discords, and social media, players have identified mid-game upgrades that offer some defense, and even let you kill fish in a round about way.

Warning! Potential spoilers for Subnautica 2 follow:

The Feedback Resonator, an upgrade for the Sonic Resonator that lets it fire a projectile, lets you shoot fish from a distance. You’ll need to work your way deep into the game to obtain it, but some reports indicate the Sonic Resonator can actually kill fish, so it’s certainly worthwhile.

Redditor Jeidoz suggests the Shockwave biomod upgrade, which gives you an electric discharge that can push fish away from you. And then there are the aforementioned flares when you’re in a pickle.

Jeidoz said they were able to complete the early access Subnautica 2 as it is now without taking damage, which sounds like a herculean effort. They used flares and dashed to run away from predators, then the Sonic Resonator to encourage fish to push off. Then, getting further into the mid-game, the Electric Discharge was used “for any dangerous situations,” and the Feedback Resonator was used for single-target enemies.

“In the current version of Early Access, I believe we only have mid-game (or even pre-mid-game?) options,” Jeidoz said. “With future updates, we can expect new vehicles, new bio-mods, fixed fish reactions to light, and other tools/actions. Currently, the PDA mentions some of them, but most fish only react to flares, ‘sounds’ from vehicles, the Sonic Resonator, the player, and stationary vehicles.”

So, the upshot is, the more you play Subnautica 2, the more you’ll be able to defend yourself. But this is not the outright ability to kill fish, as some want. Yes, you do kill fish “off screen” by eating them raw, cooking them, or turning them into other resources. But some players want to effectively clear the game out of fish, giving them the breathing room to bend the depths to their will.

This, though, does not sound like something the developers at Unknown Worlds will ever make possible in Subnautica 2. The developers have spoken in the past about not wanting players to conquer or dominate the environment, and that it wouldn’t feature tools that would let them slay anything that gets in their way. "We aren't a killing game," level designer Artyom "Artie" O'Rielly recently said in the Subnautica Discord. "Go play Sons of the Forest or something if you want to kill."

Still, Unknown Worlds is certainly thinking about tweaking the game in response to the debate. Also speaking in the Discord, lead game designer Anthony Gallegos said the developer can tune creature aggression to make fish less annoying to deal with.

“One thing that should help with this soon is the array of creature flinches we're doing,” Gallegos explained. “Right now they aren't communicating that you've impacted them, and that will change.

“We can do a lot without a stasis rifle for now, though," he added. "Some of it is just going to be rounds of tuning around creature aggression, downtime between when you run them off, etc. We clearly have work to do there, and we're doing it!”

If you're just getting started, we’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

We made it to the Magic Door with less than 10 seconds left. A couple of last-second run-ins with the guards that populate the Constable Guildhall took time we didn’t have, but we managed to escape – our contract completed, our mission objective fulfilled, and our pockets loaded down with the ill-gotten gains we’d liberated from the cops. Not a bad day’s work. Moments like this are when Thick as Thieves sings: sneaking out of a tough situation, figuring out a new way to get where you need to be, a last second escape with zeroes on the clock. Combine co-op play, a couple of thieves with unique toolkits, excellent level design that constantly forces you to make interesting decisions, and a surprisingly compelling story, and Thick as Thieves has enough to keep you coming back for one last job. I just wish there was more of it. (And that I could kill Hauntstables. If the Hauntstables have no enemies, I have departed this Earth.)

Thick as Thieves is set in 1910s Kilcairn, a fictional Scottish city that meets at the collision of magic and technology. You break into (get it? Do you get it?) the Thieves’ Guild by stealing the Vistara Diamond. But the diamond ain’t just a big shiny rock on a stick; it reveals nearby guards, hidden traps, and even treasures – and wilder stuff like hidden magic doors where the really good loot is kept. Uncovering the nature of the Diamond means uncovering the history of the city itself, and a prominent family who lived there, and pretty soon what started as a simple heist becomes a small part of a much bigger story that took me around 12 hours to tie the knot on.

Thick as Thieves’ setup – get in, get what you came for, get out – means there isn’t a lot of what you’d consider a traditional story. Most of it is told though text-based communiques that hand out your mission objectives or congratulate you on a job well done, and scattered notes that provide clues about the location of (or security surrounding) the things you’re there to snatch mid-mission. What’s here is compelling, but you kind of have to look for it, and a good chunk of it is especially easy to miss if you’re playing co-op – which you absolutely should be if you have a friend who wants to get grabby with other peoples’ things.

Thieving effectively means being aware of your surroundings and not getting caught, so if you’ve ever played a stealth game, you’ll be at home here. Crouching under trip wires, avoiding pressure plates, turning off rotating turrets, and avoiding magic eyes are the name of the game. Most of the time you’ll be crouched, moving slowly as you snuff out candles, turn off lamps, and try to make as little noise as possible. The actual thieving comes in the form of a cute little minigame to pick locks in order to open doors or snag treasures secured in display cases. You’ll also collect clues that lead you to each mission’s big score or its story-based contract, both of which are active at once. The former could be anything from stealing enough stuff to hit a certain monetary threshold or finding specific items, while the latter requires you to “acquire” an object that only appears if you’re on that contract. It’s best to do both, but you’re not out of luck if you only do one (preferably the contract).

Avoiding traps is simple enough if you pay attention (or use the Diamond, which makes things much easier), but the guards themselves are another thing entirely. Their patterns are predictable, but they’re alert to most sounds and even catching a glimpse of you will cause them to investigate. You’re a thief, not a fighter, and if they catch you, they’ll tell you to stop resisting (even when you’re not) before zapping you with lightning until you’re dead. If you want them gone (and you do), your best bet is to sneak up behind them and knock them out.

If they see you first, you’re not entirely defenseless. A smoke grenade will stun them long enough for you to put them to sleep, and you can always run. Plus, completing contracts and absconding with loot will level you up, giving you access to consumable items like the Insult Fairy, which distracts guards by doing exactly what you’d think, or the Pickpocket Fairy, which does… exactly what you’d think, and is super handy when you want a guard’s key without getting near him. So yeah, guards can be annoying, but the best part is you always have an out (unless you’ve already spent it), and unless you trigger a trap that locks you in a room with one, you can always run.

And if you’re smart, you can just avoid them entirely. Each thief has four slots of usable items: one is reserved for the Diamond, two are for any combination of smoke grenades, fairies, and other useful tools, and the final is unique to that thief. Thick as Thieves has two: the Spider, which is what you start with, and the Chameleon, which you unlock. The former has a grappling hook that can allow you to pull yourself up, down, and all around, and the latter can copy the form of a guard and use it to walk around in disguise.

The Chameleon is cool and suave and has some great voice lines (“and a penny for the vicar!”), but the Spider has all of that and a grappling hook, so she wins. Why walk past an annoying guard when you can just go over him, you know? What I like most, no matter who you choose, is that Thick as Thieves is always encouraging you to play smart and make good decisions. You’ll start off very cautious, but playing smart also means realizing that guard is in your path and the fastest way to where you need to be is to bomb his ass with a smoke grenade and choke him out. Yeah, being stealthy is great, but I like that you’re rewarded for playing offense and taking smart risks, too – like sprinting to get past a magic eye before it spots you.

But all the tricks in the world will only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll run into Hauntstables (incredible name, by the way), who are Constables cursed to be cops for all eternity. Some of the lore frames this as punishment, which feels valid for choosing to be a very intentionally corrupt cop, but nobody should be forced to be a cop forever. I feel for the Hauntstables when they complain about waiting forever for a cup of coffee or say it feels like they’ve been on this shift forever because, well, they have. But man they’re a pain.

The big deal with Hauntstables is that they’re ghosts, so they can go through walls, ascend through floors, descend through roofs, and can’t be knocked out. They also hurt you if they get too close, so if you are spotted, you need to move. Getting away from them is tricky, and you mostly either need a smoke grenade to stun them or clear path to book it down to have a chance. Sometimes you’ll die not because one spotted you, but because you were low on health and he just happened to walk by. Slither Sap, one of your equipable items, allegedly has a “strange interaction” with them, but I have thrown a lot of Slither Sap at these cats and nothing seemed to happen. What does work, though, is turning on gramophones. Hauntstables do not like bagpipes. Their loss is your gain, but these guys are going to send you to an early grave more than once. Luckily, you do respawn, just without whatever loot you snagged (though you can bank your spoils at certain single-use stashes scattered across the map), which is dangerous when you’re up against a timer.

The most annoying thing about Hauntstables, though, is that they get stuck. Normal guards will see their buddies unconscious on the ground and pick them up before searching for you and then eventually going about their business if you stay hidden, but Hauntstables can’t pick people up, so they can get stuck in an infinite loop of “see guy on the ground, be shocked, be unable to do anything about it, see guy on the ground” and so on. This is funny, but it also means that Hauntstable won’t go back to his patrol path, which is a pain if you’re trying to get past the area he happens to be stuck in. Usually, this eventually resolves (especially if you die), but it’s annoying, though never gamebreaking.

What carries Thick as Thieves, aside from the charming art, roguish… rogues, and general Cool Vibes are the levels. There are unfortunately only two: the aforementioned Constable Guildhall and Elway Manor, but they’re both so good that I can almost forgive it. Each is a multi-story behemoth ripe with hidden paths and tons of ways to get where you need to be, and they do change from time to time as some paths open and others close. Combine that with your thief’s skills and the ever-changing objectives you’ll have when you enter each level (as well as difficulty options that add more traps and guards), and I never got bored.

There’s a joy to mastering these levels and knowing exactly how to get where you need to be, but there are a couple downsides. Certain notes – like the ones that explain that Hauntstables don’t like gramophones – appear on the map every time, which can be irritating when you’re looking for mission or contract-specific clues and you find one you’ve seen before. It’s also just kind of a bummer to finish a contract and know that the next one will either send you to the other level or back to where you just were. Variety is the spice of theft, after all.

My favorite thing about Thick as Thieves, though, is the online co-op. It’s fun to split up and explore separate areas, coordinate to take out a guard, or have your buddy save you at the last moment, and vice-versa. And getting picked up next to the stuff you dropped is way better than respawning in a safe area. It does make levels easier, but it’s so much more fun to play with a friend that I kind of don’t care. Besides, you can always crank up the difficulty setting if you’re into that.

For the better part of a century, the Caped Crusader has maintained a level of aura rarely seen in characters kissing the public domain. He’s been a purple-gloved pulp avenger and a swashbuckling ‘70s love god, a camp icon and a goth baddie. Frank Miller’s iconoclastic boomer, Grant Morrison’s avatar of determination, and Scott Snyder’s Absolute unit are all wildly different iterations of a timeless concept existing under the same cowl. The games have only been a little more consistent.

We’ve previously explored the rocky origins of Batman in the world of video games, and today we look at arguably the Dark Knight’s most challenging chapter: navigating the extreme highs and lows of an era dominated by The Animated Series and Joel Schumacher’s nippled Batsuits, right as video game hardware changed how we played forever.

Almost Got ‘Im (1993 - 1994)

Batman: The Animated Series is a high-water mark among all Bat-media. Premiering in 1992, it is the platonic ideal of the Dark Knight, anchored by iconic voice performances, unheard of depth and undeniable style.

The series inspired four video games during its initial run, although one of them barely counts. Only Konami’s 1993 Game Boy title actually released under the “Animated Series” moniker, which features excellent platforming and an impressive dedication to showcase the show’s lavish production into a 2.5 inch cartridge. There’s a lot of game in that little grey box. It’s the first time Batman’s rogue’s gallery was really showcased, featuring seven A-list villains unrestrained by the smaller scope of a film adaptation. It’s also the first time we get to play as Robin, a keystone of the comic franchise whose relationship with Bruce remains criminally underexplored in movies and games to this day.

Konami followed up with an SNES title in 1994. Originally developed as a BTAS tie-in but published as The Adventures of Batman and Robin, the boy wonder is barely involved in the proceedings. Instead, a solo Batman battles through stages styled as episodes from the TV series, complete with unique art deco title cards for each. This format offers more than most Batman sidescrollers, with impressive Mode 7 boss battles, overhead Batmobile sections, and levels that mechanically complement the signature gimmicks of their respective rogues.

Not to be outdone, Sega published its own BTAS adaptation the same year. Batman and Robin for Genesis was developed by Clockwork Tortoise and is a technical tour-de-force of pseudo 3D scaling and rotation effects, utilizing brilliant tricks and scanline-level hacks to create visuals that simply shouldn’t exist on hardware primarily designed to play Altered Beast.

The gameplay doesn’t even pay lip service towards Batman’s skill as a detective, or his finely-honed physical combat skills. Instead, it’s a pure run-and-gun in the explosive tradition of Contra and Gunstar heroes, in which the Dark Knight and his ward run to the right, flinging an infinite supply of Batarangs at full auto while their tireless arms never flag. The dynamic duo can finally be played in co-op action here, though the presence of your trusty sidekick does little to alleviate the game’s notorious difficulty.

There are only four stages, but they are merciless and enormous– one autoscrolling Batwing section clocks in at over 16 minutes. Buildings explode, zeppelins are hijacked, and the entire world dissolves into a virtual reality hellscape as you make your way to Mr. Freeze’s sci-fi fortress. Anyone who can conquer the hyperactive gauntlet and throw the down-bad doctor back in his icy cell with a mere three lives and two continues deserves to be adopted by Bruce Wayne.

There’s one last game to round out this brief, beautiful era before the Bat-nipple arrived to change everything: Batman and Robin for the Sega CD. This one is particularly strange. For one thing, it’s a fully-priced release made out of what’s essentially a minigame, consisting of naught but a series of vehicle stages using the old Batman Returns engine in which the Dark Knight never gets out of his car.

What sets the Sega CD version apart, however, has nothing to do with the gameplay. Between the boring Batmobile levels we’re treated to full-motion video cutscenes that, at first glance, appear to be ripped directly from the Animated Series. That’s not technically correct, since the disc actually includes completely original footage, voiced by the same cast, directed by Bruce Timm, written by Paul Dini, and animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, the studio behind the standout episodes like Feat of Clay and Robin’s Reckoning. The 16 minutes of footage essentially comprise a lost episode, and if you can stomach the extremely compressed and dithered, 64-color video at 160p, the Sega CD cutscenes are worth tracking down.

The 16-bit era was very good to Batman, but a new age lurked ominously on the horizon. Casting aside Tim Burton’s vision and the Animated Series it inspired, a very different version of the Dark Knight would rise, bathed in a neon glow, and heralded by the haunting sounds of Seal and the Smashing Pumpkins. The games wouldn’t be much better.

The Ice Age (1995 - 2003)

On the big screen, new Batman director Joel Schumacher crafted a more toyetic vision for the Dark Knight. His first film, Batman Forever, spawned just two games. And for the first time, the movie tie-ins would be largely the same game ported to every platform, and who better to do that than the devs who brought Mortal Kombat into your living room?

Acclaim and Probe Entertainment’s Batman Forever is essentially a 2D fighter bolted to a beat ‘em up, a star-crossed pairing if there ever was one, and much like the later Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, it commits the cardinal sin of mapping jump to the up button, turning exploration into aggravation. The Dark Knight is no stranger to fighting games, but the execution in Batman Forever is, frankly, embarrassing, with so many esoteric button combinations that the instruction manual looks like sheet music.

Like Mortal Kombat, the game uses digitized sprites of stuntmen in bogus imitations of the film’s sensuously molded rubber, shuffling across bland and illegible scenery with zero Schumacher swagger onscreen. It’s astonishing anyone managed to make a movie that’s so extra into a game this dull.

If you just read a description of Batman Forever: The Arcade Game, you’d think it was largely the same as the console version. But look closer at its digitized sprites and you’ll notice that the schlubby stand-ins have been replaced with juiced-up CGI renders ala Killer Instinct, ready to melt your brain with nonstop button-smashing action. A psychedelic braindance of Game UI bombards the screen with combo counters, massive health bars, and bouncing powerups. Batman and Robin can annihilate waves of enemies with godlike ultra moves while an announcer barks phrases like “FRENZY MODE!” to a backdrop of speed metal guitars.

For all its extravagance, The Arcade Game received little fanfare. Notably, it’s the first Bat-Title IGN ever reviewed – we gave it a 5/10. Beat ‘em ups might have been Batman’s specialty, but by the late ‘90s they were considered stale and old-fashioned. The same could be said about 2D graphics, which is why the Dynamic Duo sprinted into the third dimension for their next game: Batman & Robin.

Based on the much-maligned film of the same name and originally set to release alongside it, Probe needed extra time to finish the game which forced Acclaim to delay it by a year, meaning that not only did Batman & Robin for Playstation miss the movie launch, by the time it came out the movie it was based on was already a global laughingstock. It’s a shame, because if you strip away the Schumacherian specifics there’s something genuinely ambitious underneath: a 3D, open-world Batman simulator bashing its head against the limitations of the Playstation hardware.

You control one of the three Bat-characters, including Batgirl in a series first, each patrolling the city with their own mean machine. You take discovered clues back to the Batcave, where you’ll decipher them to find out where, and more importantly when, mischief is afoot. The game runs on a relentless real-time clock, forcing you to be on time for Mr. Freeze’s latest caper or face an automatic game over. There are no checkpoints or quick restarts, so you’d better factor in the five-minute travel time to find an extremely rare save point. No one said it would be easy being Batman.

Batman and Robin has a reputation as one of the worst Batman games of all time, and it probably deserves it. Between the busted tank controls, tedious difficulty, obnoxious sound effects, and utter confusion about what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s not a pleasant experience. Look deeper, however, and you’ll see some pretty fascinating stuff buried within. Gotham is littered with locations to explore, from Arkham Asylum to the Ace Chemical Plant to Crime Alley itself, all accessible by Bat-foot or vehicle. The game looks great for its age, and if you’re enough of a sicko to somehow beat it, you’re rewarded with a credits scene featuring dorky caricatures of the development team. They might not have delivered the best Batman game, but these doe-eyed goofballs clearly gave it all they had.

No Man’s Land (2000 - 2003)

The next Batman game wasn’t really a Batman game, in the sense that the man under the cowl isn’t Bruce Wayne. Instead, it was based on Batman Beyond, the cult classic animated series set in 2039 in which scrappy teenager Terry McGinnis inherited the mantle from the retired billionaire.

2000’s Return of the Joker for Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color is an adaptation of the direct-to-video movie of the same name, a controversial film that was heavily censored for its disturbing portrayal of child brainwashing and violence, which is a bit rich considering Batman has spent decades recruiting traumatized orphans to break people’s bones on his behalf.

The game is less interesting than the movie’s reputation suggests, a barebones, entirely unremarkable polygonal beat-’em-up that barely takes advantage of Terry’s futuristic tech and only superficially scratches the surface of the extremely schway TV show it adapted. Released at the end of a console generation with exciting new hardware already on the market, Return of the Joker’s existence registered as a mere twip on the radar that still remains the only dedicated Batman Beyond game we’ve ever gotten.

Return of the Joker was the first Batman game published by Ubisoft, which started its stewardship of the IP rights on a bad foot and promptly made it worse with a follow-up, Gotham City Racer. One persistent tension throughout the history of Batman games is the balance between superhero action and driving segments, two very different gaming rhythms welded uneasily together. A game built entirely on the driving half of that equation had been tried before and hadn’t worked then either, and whatever refinements 3D vehicular combat had undergone in the intervening years weren’t enough to make Gotham City Racer an enjoyable experience. The Sega CD at least had Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and the anime studio that made Akira behind it.

Gotham City Racer and Ubisoft’s subsequent titles would all work within the stylings of The New Batman Adventures, the revamped animated series. First came Batman: Vengeance, a third-person action-adventure game for PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox in 2001. Batman’s brand of high-tech sneak-aroundery plays like a chubby guy in hockey pads compared to Solid Snake and Sam Fisher, but Ubisoft Montreal created an ambitious game that tries to encompass every aspect of Batman’s extremely weird job, but without anything to really pull you through it.

What it did offer was a faithful translation of the animated series into 3D, complete with an original story and great performances from the all-star voice cast that helped give it a premium, classic BTAS feel. Even the side-scrolling Game Boy Advance version punches above its weight in visuals and variety, from platforming and shmup sections to solving overhead sokoban dungeons.

Instead of refining the raw potential of the Vengeance approach, Ubisoft swerved back into familiar territory with the bog-standard beat-’em-up Batman: The Rise of Sin Tzu. The gameplay is rather retrograde for 2003, a bland button-mashing brawler. The most notable aspect of the gameplay is that it’s our first opportunity to kick some butts as Nightwing, though the relatively low polygon count did a disservice to the former Robin’s notorious physique.

The real draw of Rise of Sin Tzu is the titular villain, a new character heavily hyped as the second coming of Harley Quinn. Voiced by the late Cary-Hiryoki Togawa, Sin Tzu was a master planner and military strategist who engineered an Arkham outbreak to weaken Gotham’s fabled Dark Knight before beating him in single combat. He’s essentially Bane mixed with Big Boss, but despite his cool golden skin and the yin-yang plastered to his forehead like a Pog, the Gary Stu known as Sin Tzu has retreated into obscurity after the poor reception to his debut game. Outside of rare cameos he’s been trapped on sixth-generation consoles for the last twenty years.

Sin Tzu would be Ubisoft’s final Batman title, but the promised Batman renaissance was still a few years away. In the meantime, there was one more game to close out this extremely disappointing era: Kemco’s cautionary tale Batman: Dark Tomorrow.

On paper, Dark Tomorrow seemed promising: a 3D Batman game based on the comic book ideal of the character, unburdened by movies or TV and relying on the excellent comics of the era for flavor, showcasing lesser-known characters like Cassandra Cain’s Batgirl for the first and basically only time.

Scott Peterson, a longtime writer and editor of DC’s Batman books, was tapped to write the story, a serviceably cinematic tale involving Ra’s Al Ghul threatening to flood the world’s coastlines while Batman is busy rescuing Jim Gordon from the bedlam of Arkham Asylum. Squint and the concept kind of resembles Rocksteady’s revolutionary game that was still six years away, though the execution was anything but.

Dark Tomorrow’s problems started at the top. The project was led by a would-be film producer who had never shipped a game before, and he prioritized the CGI cutscenes and overall presentation above all else. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded a full symphonic score, while the worthless enemy AI was programmed through a Game Boy Advance emulator by a team with mostly handheld experience.

What began as a sprawling, urban open world ala Spider-Man 2 instead became a linear, laborious trek through colorless warehouses, docks, factories, and sewers before schlepping through Arkham. Fixed camera angles give a nauseating effect, mocking the very notion of a 180-degree rule and making combat borderline impossible. On the rare occasion the Dark Knight knocks someone down, he has to handcuff every single enemy with a vibe-shattering mandatory cutscene you’ll watch a thousand times.

The game has multiple endings, all but one of which results in the death of Batman or an apocalyptic global flood. Even if you defeat Ra’s al Ghul, millions will be unalived unless you’ve solved a puzzle the game never hints at, using an ability you’ve had no reason to touch the entire time.

If you want a summary of Batman games in 2003, “Dark Tomorrow” just about covers it. The character was a punchline post-Schumacher, the DCAU was winding down, and the games’ performance over the last decade ranged from aggressively mid to utterly atrocious. The comic books were cooking, but things looked bleak on the Bat-front as far as pop culture and gaming were concerned. Something had to give and something would. In the immortal words of Aaron Eckhart: the night is darkest before dawn. And after a very dark night, the gates of Arkham Asylum were getting ready to open…

Our exploration of the history of Batman video games has already dived into the era of Tim Burton's gothic movies, and tomorrow's chapter will examine how the Arkham series changed superhero games forever.

Microsoft has confirmed the lineup of games coming to Xbox Game Pass during the second half of May as well as the early part of June.

It’s a quieter second half of the month after big hitters including Forza Horizon 6 hit Game Pass already, but there are still some eye-catching additions and a few day one releases. As revealed in a post on Xbox Wire, Frontier’s Jurassic World Evolution 3 is set for Game Pass following its October 2025 launch, and Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition joins the subscription service.

Day one titles include Kwalee Labs' bullet hell action adventure game Luna Abyss, Cococucumber's sci-fi deckbuilding RPG sequel Echo Generation 2, Aggro Crab's physics-based party game Crashout Crew, and Doot's tiny bug collection game Kabuto Park.

Xbox Game Pass May 2026 Wave 2 lineup:

• Dead Static Drive (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• My Friend Peppa Pig (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Pigeon Simulator (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Remnant II (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Winter Burrow (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Luna Abyss (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 21
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Escape Simulator (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 26
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Echo Generation 2 (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 27
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 27
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Crashout Crew (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – May 28
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Kabuto Park (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 28
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Final Fantasy VI (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – June 2
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Jurassic World Evolution 3 (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – June 2
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass

Microsoft will no doubt have a number of big Game Pass announcements at its Xbox showcase event, which is set for June 7. As usual, a number of games leave Game Pass this month. You can grab a discount if you buy the games to keep playing.

Everything leaving Xbox Game Pass on May 31:

• Against the Storm (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Crypt Custodian (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Metaphor: ReFantazio (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Persona 4 Golden (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Spray Paint Simulator (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

It’s always a drag when a game you are looking forward disappoints, but it’s even sadder when it shows you exactly how it didn’t have to at the same time. Plenty of games miss the mark in some way, but the ones that prove they have promise – that show you a spark, but not any kindling – are the real letdowns. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s spark ignites a little over halfway through, and it burned so hot I literally shouted with joy… only to watch that ember fade away without a twig in sight shortly after. Its creative creature designs are truly impressive, and the open-ended levels they live in can be a real delight to explore the first time through. But its best ideas often go unnurtured, which makes this tome feel less like a fantasy novel and more like a biology textbook: a collection of amusing experiments paired with a pile of homework.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a puzzle-platformer that puts its emphasis squarely on the puzzle part. Each level is based around some novel little (or sometimes quite big) creature that Yoshi must lick, lift, or lob to learn all he can about it. These bits of information are logged as Discoveries, and they range from how a flower person’s petals turn orange when it eats an apple to how a murderous scythe monster can’t see you when hiding in tall grass. Discoveries can also be made about the level itself, rewarding you for breaking tough objects, finding hidden Smiley Flowers, or just reaching an end goal – although even that won’t “end” the level if you want to keep exploring. I really liked never quite knowing what I was in for when I hopped into a new stage.

The breadth and variety here is definitely something to celebrate, too. There are dozens of unique creatures, nearly all of which are charming to look at and carry some decently interesting mechanical gimmick for their level to be built around (as well future levels where they might also show up). There’s a green critter with the head of a bubble wand, a jellyfish that acts as one of those rich-person water jetpacks, bubblegum guys that multiply excessively when hopped on, a giant drill-nosed warthog you can ride, a bouncy hula-hooping bird, and so many more – all of which you have free reign to name yourself, which is a degree of control I should not be trusted with.

The levels you initially meet each one in are designed to both teach you about that creature and then take advantage of it to complete some goal, only a small handful of which are the typical “go to the right” structure you might expect from previous Yoshi games. An early level about bees has you recovering stolen flowers, while one about a fisherman wants you to reel in the biggest fish in the pond. All the while you’ll be peppered with a near constant stream of Discoveries just for trying to figure out where to go or how this particular critter behaves, flooding your brain with dopamine and your screen with stamps that mark your achievements.

This constant creativity is a big reason why Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is so pleasant to play, but not all of these levels are created equal. Figuring out how to best travel by seabird was a fun challenge, but aimlessly running around a Shy Guy village to make them all play music at the same time was far less inspired. Levels that rely on some disappointingly wonky physics interactions were a particular low spot across the board, with things like ricocheting a spinning top, surfing over waves and a wobbling pirate ship, or wall jumping on a springy bug being truly frustrating at times – and in a way Nintendo platformers don’t typically blunder into.

The other big issue is that these levels are all about the Discoveries so, once most of them have been made, the actual levels lose a lot of their appeal. There’s very little that’s intrinsically fun or interesting about completing these stages after the map is already covered with your past accomplishments, which makes revisiting them to find Discoveries you missed (which is the entire pitch of what Yoshi and the Mysterious Book wants you to do) a lot less amusing. This is basically a stack of themed sheets of bubble wrap: bubble wrap is fun to pop! But unless you’re really serious about bursting every single one, no matter how mundane they may be, you’re mostly just left playing with a limp piece of plastic after that first pass.

This wouldn’t be such a big problem if later levels asked you to put the Discoveries you made into practice in more interesting or creative ways, but therein lies Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s greatest letdown. Many creatures will reappear in later pages, asking you to use or interact with them to make Discoveries about the newest research subject, but these interactions are typically pretty straightforward. The maps themselves are so small that there isn’t much room for the newest creature to share the spotlight while you are learning about it. About half the levels have a variant version that does put the focus on a specific creature interaction that wasn’t in the main course, and these are some of the more interesting tasks you can find, but they are also exceptionally brief more often than not.

The major exception to this depth issue is the last level of Chapter 6, which is so good that it quite literally should have been what the entire game was built around, but sadly that’s far from the case. I’ll give you a mechanical spoiler warning now if you really want to see it for yourself, but I have to avoid certain details anyway due to Nintendo’s restrictions on what we can dicuss before release.

In this stage, Yoshi can essentially summon any creature you’ve met before (one at a time), and it completely recontextualizes everything you’ve done up until that point in a way that made me genuinely jump out of my seat. Suddenly all that “research” you did was actually training, and it’s up to you to figure out how to scale that waterfall, dig through that mountain, or fight that enemy. For a game all about experimentation and discovery, it’s one of the very few times you are given the power to actually get creative and truly apply what you’ve learned to solve problems.

This level rules. The moment it was thought up, the dev team should have centered everything else around it. I wish every chapter ended with a stage like this that applies your knowledge of the creatures you met just before it, and I was at least expecting its arrival roughly eight hours in to signal an “Act 2” of sorts that put this mechanic front and center. Instead, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book pretty much pretends like it never happened and mostly goes back to business as usual as it introduces more and more creatures it will never make full use of.

It’s such a bummer, man. Nearly every level was amusing to some degree on my first run through it, but I started to get tired of how shallow the creature exploration felt as early as Chapter 3. I held out hope that I simply hadn’t gotten to some turning point yet, but that’s truly what this game wants to be: a series of cute gimmicks, each with a big checklist of boxes to methodically tick off for little reason other than the love of hearing that “pop.” To be shown what this enticing concept could have been used for instead, and then have the rug pulled out from under me right after, left a sour taste in my mouth that none of the chapters and challenges that followed ever managed to make up for. You’re rarely asked to build in this sandbox, just to dig for the marbles buried beneath it.

To its credit, there are a ton of Discoveries to find, and some of them are genuinely well hidden or tricky to sniff out, so I imagine this game will appeal to the type of completionist that does just love the pop. There’s a built-in hint system that lets you spend a plentiful currency called Tokens to see which ones you are missing and how to find them, too, so it never leaves you flailing in the dark wondering what hyper-specific interaction you haven’t tried yet. The tools are there to make Discovery hunting a relatively painless process – it’s just never a particularly rewarding one.

The collectible I was more inclined to track down all of were the Smiley Flowers, and there are generally somewhere in the range of three to six per level. These are hidden in very classic Yoshi platformer ways, usually asking you to reach certain spots or uncover hidden areas where they are tucked away. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book has plenty of similarities to previous Yoshi games in stuff like its egg throwing and flutter jumping, but it doesn’t actually share a whole lot of DNA in a practical sense. That’s totally fine, and I dig when a developer experiments with a series in interesting ways, but something about hunting for flowers was satisfying in a way that asking variations of, “Have I tried dunking this nerd under water yet?” simply was not.

Collecting those flowers was fun enough on its own, but the reward you get for doing so has got to be one of the most perplexing unlockables I have ever seen in any video game. Not available until after Chapter 6 – which, again, took me about eight hours to finish, and I only spent another five or six after that to finish every available level – five Smiley Flowers can be exchanged for… a new UI element. These nonsensical options to customize the information your screen displays while in a level range from a chat log for your bookish companion, Mr. E, to graphs that tells you the flavor profile of anything you lick. There are multiple ways to measure speed, water quality, temperature, and a whole host of other variables that no level ever asks you to care about in any way.

Nothing about this system is offensive or distracting, but very little about it is helpful either. Apart from a clock that I imagine speedrunners will appreciate, pretty much the only useful one I’ve unlocked so far is a radar that points toward nearby Smiley Flowers. Even stuff like displaying Yoshi’s remaining health (yes, he has health they don’t tell you about) is pointless when no amount of damage will actually “defeat” him. Its customizable nature also allows you to cover your entire screen in unhinged garbage for no reason, which is the kind of commitment to the bit I actually admire more than anything else. I don’t remotely understand it, but I guess I at least respect it in a weird way.

Fortnite is back on the App Store, with Epic boss Tim Sweeney declaring "the beginning of the end of the Apple Tax worldwide."

Sweeney’s ongoing battle to get Fortnite back on iPhones and Android phones without paying store fees is well-documented. Epic doesn’t want to pay the now standard 30% store fee on revenue made from mobile games, instead preferring to direct players to its own mobile store, the Epic Games Store, without Apple and Google getting in the way. Sweeney has been fighting this battle since 2020, spending a great deal of cash in the process, even as Fortnite was blocked on iOS. It felt as though Epic had won this time last year following a significant court ruling, but Apple ultimately blocked Fortnite's return.

Now, Epic has pushed Fortnite back onto iOS, with Sweeney saying the decision was made after Apple told the U.S. Supreme Court that "regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States." Epic said it was "confident that once Apple is forced to show its costs, governments around the world will not allow Apple junk fees to stand."

"We will continue to challenge Apple’s anticompetitive App Store practices of banning alternative app stores and competition in payments," Epic Games added in a statement.

"We’ve seen momentum around the world to address these practices, with regulators passing laws in Japan, the European Union and the United Kingdom - but time and time again, Apple has evaded the laws with scare screens, fees and onerous requirements. It’s time for regulators to truly enforce the laws so developers and consumers around the world can benefit from an open and fair mobile app ecosystem."

Epic boss Tim Sweeney said on X/Twitter earlier today: "Fortnite is back on the Apple App Store as we head into the final battle of Epic v Apple in court. For years, Apple has fragmented iOS features and fees by territory, taking regulatory negotiating positions in secret, and intentionally delaying the pursuit of justice."

"Apple has now told the Supreme Court, 'Regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States.' So we see this as the beginning of the end of the Apple Tax worldwide," Sweeney continued.

"This is a critical moment in the battle against the App Store empire to win freedom for all developers and consumers, and we'll continue the fight in every jurisdiction worldwide until competition is restored to digital stores and payment markets everywhere."

Interestingly, Fortnite has yet to return to the Australian App Store. Epic said it was waiting for a court order to "bring Apple's unlawful conduct to an end and to make orders that will benefit all app developers and iOS users."

"Epic can't return under an illegal payment arrangement with Apple, so unless Apple agrees to adopt lawful payment terms in the interim, we must wait for a Court decision," the company added.

Fortnite returns to iOS amid a particularly difficult time for the once all-conquering battle royale. Epic suffered major layoffs back in March following a downturn in interest in Fortnite itself. Analysts told IGN that fewer people playing the game's veteran battle royale was only one of its problems, however, following the time and money spent over the past few years fighting costly legal battles with Apple and Google, while bankrolling the Epic Games Store as it attempts to rival Steam. And then there's the explosive growth of Roblox, which dwarfs the engagement seen by Fortnite's own creator-made modes.

Image credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Samsung.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Sony has reportedly reaffirmed its pullback from PC, telling staff its narrative single-player games will remain PlayStation 5 exclusive. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said PlayStation studio business boss Hermen Hulst told staff on Monday, locking in the likes of Saros, Ghost of Yotei, and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet to PlayStation. While multiplayer games will continue to launch on PC as well as PlayStation, it’s a significant change of strategy from Sony, and deprives PC gamers of the company’s tentpole releases.

PC gamers have been reacting to the news with a mix of disappointment and lack of surprise. While some had hoped to play these narrative games on their platform of choice, others have said they’re not missing out on much. Others still, have said they continue to see no reason to buy a PS5 just to play these games — especially given Sony just raised the price of its console hardware.

“I skipped buying a PS5 and I don't feel like I've missed out,” said one PC gamer on the PC gaming subreddit. “Yeah, back when Spider-Man came out, I was REALLY excited for it and was considering buying a PlayStation just to play it, but I held back,” another added. “When it finally came out on PC, it was good, but not as great as I built up in my head. Any game that comes out as PS exclusive, I'll just remind myself of Spider-Man.”

“Why would a PC gamer buy a 600 dollar PS5 for a few games?” questioned another. “Do you know what happens instead? The PC gamer simply ignores Sony games and plays other PC games. Sony forgets if people are willing to wait YEARS for a port and then LONGER for a discount that sure as s**t isn't the crowd that runs out to buy a console and games that keep going up in price.”

“As much as I love the Horizon series I just won’t be playing part three I guess,” another said. “There’s no way I’d buy a console for the few games I’d be interested in.”

“PS5 has been out for ages and still has no games, and he wants to double down,” another said in a comment that sums up much of the sentiment within the PC gaming community.

“Please tell Hermen Hulst that my wallet is exclusive to PC games (preferably Steam) and I don't want to buy a PS console to play Sony games anymore,” said another. “That worked before, when there was quality, genre variety and overall quantity. Now it's not worth it anymore.”

“This isn't going to magically make me buy a Playstation. It's just going to make me not buy your games,” another said.

You get the idea. It’s important to note that Sony has yet to issue a consumer-facing comment on all this (it’s not commented publicly at all), so we don’t know the rationale. Still, others have offered their take. In March, when Bloomberg first reported the news, it suggested poor recent sales of PlayStation games on PC and the risk to the PlayStation brand, as well as a potential impact on PS5 and maybe even PS6 sales, were to blame for the policy shift. Bloomberg also suggested the prospect of PlayStation games running on the next Xbox, which will run PC games, may have also encouraged Sony’s return to console exclusives.

Meanwhile, Peter Dalton, Head of Technology at Bluepoint Games, took to social media to say a “more interesting possibility” is that Sony is responding to the rise of a Steam-based console ecosystem, aka the recently announced and subsequently delayed Steam Machine.

Sony has in recent years expanded PlayStation to PC, but refrained from going as far as Microsoft, which releases all its games on PC at the same time as console. Sony, however, has employed a staggered approach, releasing its single-player PlayStation games on PC after a period of console exclusivity. When it comes to live service games like Helldivers 2 it’s a different story, with Sony publishing on PC day-one — and in the case of Arrowhead’s third-person action game, to record-breaking success. Sony-owned Bungie launched live service extraction shooter Marathon across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S at the same time earlier this year. Guerrilla’s live-service multiplayer Horizon spinoff, Hunters Gathering, is due out on PC and PS5. Fairgames, from Haven Studios, is down for PC and PS5 also.

Sony’s decision to return to PlayStation exclusivity comes at an interesting time. Microsoft is said to be considering some sort of exclusivity policy change as it works to win over the hearts and minds of hardcore Xbox fans. Indeed, exclusive games is the top request on a recently launched official Xbox feedback platform. The question is, can Sony and Microsoft get away with leaving multiplatform money on the table?

In April, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida suggested that Sony would struggle to recoup the huge budgets invested in its first-party games without porting them to PC.

"In PS4 days still we are making AAA games with big budget," Yoshida said. "I somehow felt the bigger the budget, the safer in some strange way. Creating bigger, better-looking games that people are asking for. In the past it kind of worked, you know, business wise. But in the last five or so years, publishers and developers must have realized that model may not be sustainable.

"Releasing games on PC after a couple of years must have helped recoup the investment of these big budget games and help[ed] the team and company to reinvest that money into their new games," he added, "So, from a business standpoint, I think it made sense for me.

"If they were releasing new AAA games day one on other platforms, I don’t think that’s a good strategy for [a] platform holder like PlayStation. I’m not seeing any proof of them changing their strategy this generation, but if they are changing it’s going to be interesting how they are able to maintain the investment on the big budget games on the first-party side going forward."

It’s worth noting that getting into PlayStation console gaming has become more expensive this year. After price rises in March, a new PS5 now starts at $600, and a PS5 Pro now costs $900. And just this week, Sony announced PlayStation Plus price rises, blaming "ongoing market conditions."

Reacting to the PlayStation exclusivity news, Mat Piscatella, Senior Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana, expressed concern about the viability of Sony’s decision.

“I hope — well, for everyone's sake, really — that 'ongoing global market conditions' drastically improve rather quickly or I expect this decision will be reversed sooner rather than later,” he said.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The soundtrack of the original 1993 Doom has been inducted into the National Recording Registry.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, "with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections." Founded over two hundred years ago, it sits as the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

The latest inductees, of which there are 25, have been dubbed as "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage." Bobby Prince's "adrenaline-fueled" score is the third piece of video game history to be immortalized this way.

"Key to Doom's popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by Prince," a Registry spokesperson said (thanks, GI.biz). "Prince, a lifelong musician and practising lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition, an interest that led to his earliest work composing video games.

"Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies. The Doom soundtrack would go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers."

"The sweep and diversity of the National Recording Registry class of 2026 beautifully captures the scope of the American experience as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Robbin Ahrold, chair of the National Recording Preservation Board. "From icons of R&B to a holiday favorite en Español, from a legendary sports broadcast to this generation’s superstars, it is a thrilling reflection of America at its best."

Doom is the third such video game score to make it into the register. The first was the Super Mario Bros. theme, which joined the archive in 2023. Daniel Rosengeld's soundtrack for Minecraft was added in 2025.

Other inductees this year include Taylor Swift's 1989, Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), The Go-Go’s debut album Beauty and the Beat, Vince Gill’s Go Rest High On That Mountain, Weezer’s self-titled debut Weezer (The Blue Album), Chaka Khan’s hit I Feel for You, and Broadway’s original cast album of Chicago.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

One of the biggest — if not biggest — questions from fans of Warhammer 40,000 lore is: who will be the next returning loyalist primarch? In a rare Q&A video, Games Workshop actually addressed the question — but failed to provide a meaningful answer.

For the uninitiated, the primarchs are the overpowered, genetically-engineered demigod sons of the Emperor, created to lead the Space Marine legions before they were broken up into chapters following the catastrophic civil war known as the Horus Heresy. Warhammer 40,000 as a narrative operated for decades with most of the primarchs either thought dead or lost in the warp, but recent years have seen two loyalist primarchs return to the current setting, sparking speculation that more are on the way.

The two primarchs confirmed alive and active in the Warhammer 40,000 setting are Ultramarines boss Roboute Guilliman, who returned to the galaxy during the Gathering Storm event in 2017, and Dark Angels chief Lion El'Jonson, who miraculously popped back into existence as part of the Arks of Omen storyline in early 2023. These were galaxy-shaking plot developments for the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and with the upcoming release of the 11th Edition of the tabletop game, some are wondering if a third loyalist primarch will return to shake things up further.

And so, in the Q&A video, Games Workshop’s Adam Troke and Eddie Eccles brought up the question themselves: “Who will be the next returning loyalist primarch?”

“It’s a good question, but I’m really sorry to break it to you Adam, they’re actually all dead,” Eccles replied.

“All of them?” Troke said.

“I’m pretty sure they’re all dead,” Eccles insisted.

Troke then began to have a bit of fun with his response: “Well, so, we do know that Russ is back… as a tank. Rogal Dorn… as a tank. If I was a betting man, you could maybe expect a battle tank called a Khan or a Manus or a Sanguinius at some point.”

Then, finally: “Interesting that the question was ‘who,’ rather than ‘will.’ They’re dead, according to Eddie.”

While Games Workshop had a cheeky response to a question that was probably never going to include a definitive answer, many Warhammer 40,000 fans have already picked it apart, pointing out that in the lore, it’s not entirely clear that all the other loyalist primarchs are indeed dead. You see this debate pop up now and again on Warhammer subreddits, discords, and across social media. For example, Jaghatai Khan, primarch of the White Scars, is thought to be lost in the Webway, the weird area between realspace and the Warp the Aeldari use to get about the galaxy. Rogal Dorn, boss of the Imperial Fists, is presumed dead, but could be out and about doing primarch things behind enemy lines. Space Wolves leader Leman Russ, meanwhile, is said to be awaiting the Wolf Time before he makes a dramatic return to save his kin. Sanguinius though, he's properly dead. RIP.

The thing is, Games Workshop could bring back any loyalist primarch at any time, creating some lore to make it make sense within canon just as it did with Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson, and that would be that. Any new model for a returning primarch would no doubt prove to be a big seller, too. So it does feel like a question of when, not if, it actually happens. Money talks, after all.

Perhaps 11th Edition isn’t the right time, though, as fans are eagerly awaiting another momentous primarch-related moment, one Games Workshop has actually properly teased: the meeting of Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson. A new campaign book released earlier this year includes an intergalactic message written by Lion El'Jonson and intended for Roboute Guilliman that reads: “Brother. We need to talk.”

So, will the Lion and Guilliman finally meet this edition? That was another lore question Troke and Eccles brought up during the Q&A.

“I mean, the galaxy is a big place,” Troke said, once again keeping his cards close to his chest. “So, maybe. Maybe not. I kinda hope so. You’ve got to imagine the Lion’s got things to say.”

“It will be an interesting meeting for sure, whenever it happens,” Eccles added.

For me, it feels more likely that this meeting of brothers, 10,000 years in the making, will be the big narrative moment of 11th Edition, rather than the introduction of a new loyalist primarch, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. Any new primarch turning up is a huge moment for Warhammer 40,000 lore fans and a shot in the arm of the setting. It would move things forward and perhaps even the odds against the forces of Chaos and all those daemon primarchs who are running amok.

So, in that case, who's next?

Image credit: Warhammer Community / Games Workshop.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Surprise! Nintendo has announced free-to-start Pictonico, a new mobile game that uses your phone's photo library to generate mini-games.

Pictonico integrates your photos and turns them into 80 minigames. "Sure, it's kind of silly… But there's no telling what will happen next!" Nintendo said.

"Here come your school's sports stars… strutting down the red carpet! Your boss is hungry and needs your help! Try to wash away those embarrassing high-school memories," the company added, describing the types of mini-games available. "Son won't quiet down? Zip his mouth! Two old friends reconnect while skydiving! Grandpa dressed like a ballerina. Can't miss this photo op."

Turn your photos into silly minigames! Your camera roll comes alive in Pictonico!, launching on smart devices May 28th.

Pre-registration begins today: https://t.co/LkknQnwPXl pic.twitter.com/0wKHPNh6qc

— Nintendo UK (@NintendoUK) May 19, 2026

If that all sounds a little familiar, that's because it is. Nintendo’s WarioWare games similarly bundles together very short mini-games, and you're given just seconds to complete them before moving on or losing a life. Like the WarioWare games, the experiences in Pictonico will seemingly range from "easy to pretty tricky," and while some games are free-to-start and playable as demos, you'll need to purchase additional "volumes" to play them all, which will cost between $5.99 and $7.99.

Pictonico will release on May 28, and can be pre-ordered now on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

It's the latest effort in Nintendo's attempt to diversify its catalog across mobile and console. In a 2015 interview, late CEO and president Satoru Iwata remarked that his main goal with mobile games is not necessarily to make money, but to advertise Nintendo properties to a brand new market. "We want more people to become familiar with Nintendo IP through Nintendo’s smart device game apps," the former president said.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Microsoft is continuing its drive to revamp brand Xbox with the launch of a feedback platform that gives fans the chance to vote on community requests. Predictably, the request with the most votes is a return to exclusives.

Microsoft’s multiplatform push may have increased sales (Forza Horizon 5, for example, has found significant success on PlayStation 5), but it has come at the expense of alienating hardcore Xbox fans, some of whom want Microsoft to return to Xbox exclusivity.

Earlier this month, it was reported that new Xbox boss Asha Sharma was “treading carefully” as she worked out what to do with exclusive games. Sharma, who replaced Phil Spencer as boss of Xbox earlier this year, has spent her first few months in the job making a number of significant changes as Microsoft works to win back the hearts and minds of its core gaming fans. Among them was the end of the controversial ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing campaign, quickfire new Xbox console features, and a Game Pass price cut.

Perhaps most significant of all, Microsoft has said it will “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity,” a tantalizing tease particularly for core fans who feel Xbox consoles have been devalued amid the company’s multiplatform push in recent years.

Fans, though, have made their feelings loud and clear already, using the new ‘XBOX Player Voice’ platform to push for exclusives.

“XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. BRING THEM BACK PLEASE!!!” reads the thread with the most votes so far (6,319). The comments within it are similarly vociferous. “If you really care about Xbox, you have to bring back exclusives,” one person said. “Xbox needs to have its exclusive games to differentiate itself from the competition. Exclusives work for Sony and Nintendo, so why would it be different for Xbox?” Another added: “Exclusive content and features (hardware or otherwise) make a platform stand out in comparison to the competition. Without those, why would anyone get into the XBOX platform and not other, more popular ones? Right now XBOX simply doesn't stand out from the competition.”

The big question is, can Microsoft follow Sony’s lead and retreat from multiplatform? Microsoft has a number of first-party titles due out this year already earmarked for PS5. For example, it's promised that Forza Horizon 6 will come to PS5 later this year (and if Forza Horizon 5 is any indication, not releasing the sequel on Sony’s console would mean leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the table). Meanwhile, Microsoft has said all future Halo games will be released on Sony’s console, starting with this year’s Halo: Campaign Evolved. Playground’s Fable reboot is due out day one on PS5 this fall.

The Verge’s Tom Warren has reported that Sharma “has been evaluating a range of options for Xbox exclusive games, but is treading carefully here and isn’t yet ready to commit to any major changes.” So while hardcore Xbox fans clearly want their exclusives back, there is a question mark over whether Microsoft will agree.

Other top requests on the feedback platform reflect community concern going back years at this point. Backwards compatibility is right up there, as is making online multiplayer free to access. Another high-ranking request is for an achievement list to have a separate category for its DLC, so if you’ve got all the achievements for a game and it gets more via DLC, your 100% will remain. And then there’s the request for an Xbox Game Pass family plan, for Project Helix — the next-gen Xbox — to play discs, and the return of Xbox avatars.

Plenty, then, for Sharma to think about, although in truth none of these requests should come as much of a surprise. By opening the door to fan feedback in this way, Microsoft is creating a growing sense of hope within the community, so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft follows up by addressing the top requests and their chance of success. "We want to be clear: this doesn’t mean every piece of feedback will turn into a feature or result in a change," Microsoft clarified in its announcement on Xbox Wire. "Building across a large, global platform means weighing a lot of inputs. But better visibility helps close the gap between what you tell us and what you see happen next on XBOX."

All this talk of Xbox exclusives comes at a time when Sony has ditched PC for its narrative single-player games, which means the likes of Housemarque’s Saros, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei, Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine and, presumably, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will all remain PS5 exclusives. But it still leaves the door open for Sony’s multiplatform games to continue to release on PC.

Perhaps Microsoft will follow Sony’s lead here?

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

EA has confirmed the first details for F1 25’s 2026 Season Pack update will be made available this Wednesday, May 20. The reveal trailer for the upcoming DLC will be released at 4pm UK time, May 20 (11am EDT/8am PDT, and 1am AEST on May 21).

For the time being, EA has revealed the “cover” athletes for the update: seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, former F3 and F2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto, and veteran driver Valtteri Bottas, winner of 10 F1 Grands Prix and current owner of the greatest F1 moustache this side of Nigel Mansell.

The presence of Bortoleto and Bottas would be no accident, since they represent the two new teams on the 2026 grid: Audi and Cadillac.

EA confirmed in late 2025 that there would be no standalone F1 game released alongside the real-life 2026 season, revealing that the 2026 Formula One World Championship would be coming as a paid expansion for the existing F1 25 instead.

The content update is set to reflect all the sport’s 2026 changes, with new cars, new drivers, and the new regulations. How the new cars are handled within the 2026 season DLC will be interesting considering how critical many current F1 drivers have been of their new characteristics. Two-time F1 champ Fernando Alonso has dubbed modern F1 a “battery world championship”, 2025 champ Lando Norris has lamented F1 has gone from “the best cars ever made in Formula 1 and the nicest to drive to probably the worst”, and four-time champ Max Verstappen has quipped that he’s swapped the simulator for his Nintendo Switch, joking that he’s now practicing with Mario Kart instead.

The next full game in the series is planned for 2027, and will be “reimagined into a more expansive experience with new ways to play for fans around the world.”

IGN’s F1 25 review noted there remain “several areas where it hovers frustratingly short of its full potential,” including its fascination with clothing and emotes over classic F1 cars and content – but that it’s “comfortably the strongest the series has been since the fan favourite F1 2020.”

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

Forza Horizon 6 managed to slip in a sly reference to Pokémon.

Xbox and Playground Games' beloved racing franchise has returned, and it's arguably better than ever. Forza Horizon 6 takes the series to Japan, a long-requested setting amongst fans. Not only is Japan a beautiful location for any game, but it has a very strong and thriving car culture. After years of fleshing out the franchise, Playground finally felt comfortable in taking on the setting and making the biggest Forza game yet.

As a result, Forza embraces Japan in all kinds of different ways. Of course, there's an emphasis on drifting in the game, there are cherry blossom trees that are so culturally significant they can't be destroyed, and there are all kinds of references to Japanese culture. One of the game's most notable events even sees the player racing a giant mech through the streets of Japan. It's outrageous, but right in line with the tone of Forza. Perhaps one of the most notable Japanese references is a nod to Pokémon, Nintendo's beloved video game franchise.

While listening to the in-game radio, you may hear the radio hosts suggest that players take some pictures while exploring Japan. They then use the term, "Snap 'em all," a play on Pokémon's legendary tagline, "Gotta catch 'em all."

The radio hosts then note that it's, "like that Japanese collecting game we're not allowed to name for legal reasons." It's a fun reference that has been amusing fans, especially since Nintendo is a very litigious company that will act against anyone who infringes on Pokémon's rights.

Pokemon mentioned in Forza Horizon 6 💀 pic.twitter.com/Pbg6IYfRBh

— ຸ (@wxrry) May 16, 2026

In related news, Pokémon turns 30 this year, and there's been no shortage of ways to celebrate. Target recently teamed up with Kellanova to produce a limited-edition line of Pokémon Pop-Tarts. As you might imagine, they have been the target of scalpers, who have been snatching up stock and reselling them for four or five times their normal retail price.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Out on 3 June, the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has had preorders for its physical copies (though Game-Key Cards) drop at retailers like Amazon and Argos. Although the epic follow-up to the Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been out on PS5 and PC since early 2024 and 2025 respectively, but is finally coming to the Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S next month.

Forza Horizon 6 finally brings the racing series to Japan. Players can cruise around a highly detailed, stylized and condensed version of the country, taking in everything from downtown Tokyo, famous landmarks, and scenic country roads in all seasons as they test their mettle against other racers.

The game also rewards you with experience points for letting out that road rage by smashing your car into other vehicles or your surroundings. However, The Japan Times’ recent interview with design director Torben Ellert revealed that while you can destroy most things in Forza 6 by crashing into them (whether on purpose or because you understeered on a hairpin bend), culturally important things like shrines, temples, and cherry trees are indestructible.

“Almost all trees in the game are smashable to ensure that traversing the world map is both fun and rewarding,” Ellert explains. “However, several tree types are not — for example, the cherry blossom trees — because they’re an iconic element of Japanese culture. Certain temples or other cultural elements are also excluded so that players aren’t tempted to drive through shrines or locations of cultural importance.”

Cherry blossoms are historically and culturally important in Japan, often appearing as a key symbol in Japanese literature, art, and poetry. Their pink blossoms are a sign of rebirth and the coming of spring, but also a reminder of how fleeting life is. In ancient times, farmers made offerings and held feasts underneath the cherry trees in the hope that the spirits of the fields would bring a good harvest. In the 800s, the emperor and nobles also kicked off a tradition of holding parties to admire the cherry blossoms. These traditions have evolved into modern day hanami — cherry blossom viewing parties where people have picnics under the trees and enjoy the blossoms.

Cherry blossom trees in real life can be easily damaged. Tampering with or shaking the branches of cherry blossom trees in public parks is punishable by fines in Japan. Furthermore, some of the countries’ oldest trees are over 1,000 years old and protected as natural treasures by the government (like Uozumi Zakura in Gifu). Consideration for their cultural importance explains why UK studio Playground Games decided to make cherry trees invincible in Forza Horizon 6.

As for shrines and temples, last year, Assassins Creed Shadows received heavy pre-release backlash in Japan due to a preview that showed that players could smash up shrines. Ubisoft addressed this in a day-one patch that made shrine objects indestructible and prevented unarmed NPCs from bleeding when attacked (thus preventing bloodshed on sacred grounds). Forza Horizon 6’s devs have opted to be culturally sensitive regarding what the player can do to religious and cultural sites.

“Japan has been on our shortlist for several games now,” Ellert told The Guardian. “But we just didn’t feel like we were ready to take on the challenge of building it.” The team conducted in-depth research for the game, right down to the smallest details, hiring experts including cultural consultant and former Porsche ambassador Kyoko Yamashita to advise on their depiction of Japan and its racing scene. “Because it’s a culture we see a lot, there’s a temptation to think you know it better than you do, which is why we tried really hard to get people to course correct us if we were drifting,” added Ellert.

While those who pre-ordered the premium edition of Forza Horizon 6 are already burning rubber, the game officially releases on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on May 19. While you wait, check out IGN's Forza Horizon 6 review.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

A bunch of mom-and-pop video game stores have received mysterious shipments of one of the PS4's rarest games, Poop Slinger. If you're unfamiliar with the tale of Poop Slinger, it's a pretty interesting one. The PS4 game was released in 2018 on PSN with a physical release in 2019. The physical release was handled by Limited Rare Games, not to be confused with the more established and well-known games distributor Limited Run Games. However, as you might imagine, there wasn't a ton of demand for a game called Poop Slinger, especially when it was available digitally.

As a result, few copies were made, and even fewer were sold. Although it was estimated there were fewer than 100 copies in circulation, Sony requires a minimum of 1,000 copies to be manufactured for physical PlayStation games. Still, no one knew where the remaining 900 or so were. Due to its rarity, it became a hot item online, and copies have been listed for upwards of $1,000 on sites like eBay.

Last week, things got more interesting. Those "missing" copies started showing up at independent gaming stores across the country. YouTuber and game store owner cakehoarder claimed that 39 stores had received six sealed copies each, for a total of 234 copies released into the wild.

Still, no one actually knows where these games came from. The return address was for another game store, which was reportedly just as confused as those who received the package. It has been theorized that someone stumbled upon excess stock of Poop Slinger in a warehouse or a storage unit and opted to give it away. Others have suggested the developer or someone involved with the game may have decided to offload extra copies they had stashed somewhere.

In 2019, VG247 reported that Limited Rare Games would have to shut its doors due to the failure of Poop Slinger, and creditors would take the unsold copies to repay the loan. However, it's unclear what the creditors did with those copies. Perhaps they were sold at an auction, or they've just been sitting on them.

However, to make things even more baffling, Limited Rare Games is back. The socials for the company and its website are operational, and it even addressed the matter with a bizarre video. The company posted a video of a content creator known as Hard Rock Nick talking about the price of an undisclosed item. He talks about the stress of the fluctuating price, but it's unclear if he's referring to Poop Slinger or something else, like crypto. Hard Rock Nick died in 2024, so this isn't a video that Limited Rare Games commissioned in response to the game's reappearance.

pic.twitter.com/MferkKcSkG

— LimitedRareGames.com 🤜🏻🦄🌈 (@ltdraregames) May 16, 2026

The whole situation only provokes more questions than answers. Who sent out these copies? What is the end goal? It'll be interesting to see if this story develops further or if the chronicles of Poop Slinger remain an unsolved mystery. If you're interested in playing Poop Slinger yourself, it's available on PSN for $4.99.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Looking for some new board games to play, or maybe a puzzle to piece together this summer? Target's dropped a 'Buy One, Get One 50% Off' deal on a selection of board games, card games, and puzzles that's well worth checking out if you're shopping around.

Target ‘Buy One, Get One 50% Off’ Select Puzzles, Board, and Card Games

This offer lasts until May 25, so there's not long to take advantage of it, but it's stacked with some great picks. Above, you can find some of our favorite options included with this deal - Codenames, Catan, and a fun 100-Piece KPop Demon Hunters puzzle of Rumi from Buffalo Games, to name a few - but to see everything available, check out the full sale page here.

We think very highly of some of these picks as well, like Codenames. This board game sits on our list of the best board games to play in 2026, as it "changed the face of party games forever." Catan is another that's one of our top picks as a strategy board game and one of the best classic board games to have in your collection.

The puzzles certainly deserve a shoutout as well. The delightful Rumi KPop Demon Hunters puzzle comes from Buffalo Games, which is one of our favorite jigsaw puzzle brands. The Magic Puzzle Company is another one of our favorites which also has a couple of puzzles featured in the sale, like the Awakened Artifacts puzzle above.

Again, this is a limited-time offer that only runs until May 25. So if some of these options have caught your eye, this is your chance to save on some new items for your shelves. It's certainly not the only opportunity you'll have to save, though. As we get closer to summer sale events, we're keeping an eye out for even more board game and puzzle deals, too.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Sony has announced price increases for its subscription service, PlayStation Plus.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s monthly subscription service for PS4 and PS5 consoles that grants access to online multiplayer, monthly downloadable games, and exclusive PlayStation Store discounts.

Starting May 20, PlayStation Plus prices for new customers will increase in select regions, Sony said in its announcement, blaming "ongoing market conditions." Prices will start at $10.99 USD / €9.99 EUR / £7.99 GBP for 1-month subscriptions and $27.99 USD / €27.99 EUR / £21.99 GBP for three-month subscriptions.

The monthly subscription goes up by $1, and the three-month subscription increases by $3. This price change does not apply to current subscribers (except in Turkey and India) unless the existing subscription changes or lapses, Sony added.

The news comes amid price rises across the video game industry, particularly for hardware. Sony itself raised the price of PS5 consoles back in March, blaming “continued pressures in the global economic landscape.” Earlier this month, Sony said it had yet to decide when to launch the PlayStation 6, nor how much it would cost, as memory shortages fueled by the AI boom continue to hit hard.

As you'd expect, PlayStation fans have reacted negatively to the news, with some saying PlayStation Plus shouldn't be required for online gaming in the first place, and that these new price rises make gaming on PlayStation even costlier. Others have hit out at Sony blaming the price rises on "ongoing market conditions," pointing out Microsoft just cut the price of Xbox Game Pass.

Blaming market conditions is insane. It should be free to play online games without paywalls in 2026

— ben (@videotech) May 18, 2026

First you guys increased PS5 prices and now you increase online subscription prices

what the hell?

— NikTek (@NikTek) May 18, 2026

It's worth noting that this PlayStation Plus price hike comes six months before the planned release of GTA 6, which is expected to draw a huge number of newcomers into the current generation of consoles. An active PlayStation Plus subscription is required to play GTA Online, and there's no suggestion that will change when GTA 6 comes out. Perhaps Sony is getting its price hike in now, mindful that it will gain a flood of new PlayStation Plus subscribers who are only interested in playing GTA 6 online when it comes out.

Sony has forecast annual ‌sales at its gaming business down 6% to 4.42 trillion yen (approx. $28 billion) for the current financial year due to lower hardware sales, with the PS5 now more expensive than ever and approaching its sixth birthday. However, Sony expects gaming profit to rise 30% due to higher first-party software sales, and the absence of a huge impairment loss it recorded against struggling Marathon developer Bungie. Insomniac’s Wolverine game is due out this financial year, and will surely make a significant contribution to Sony’s performance.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Batman was created more than 80 years ago and has starred in video games for 40 of them – nearly half of his existence. But despite a long and varied existence in the comics, ranging from the world’s greatest detective to a hero willing to fight gods and aliens, the dozens of Dark Knight games across the console generations have rarely strayed far from the basics. No matter what decade it is, no matter what hardware you’re playing on, odds are that in any given Batman title you’ll be gliding off gargoyles, firing grappling hooks, and flinging Batarangs at guys in straightjackets.

This year sees one of gaming’s more unusual approaches to Batman – the version made of plastic bricks – return in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and its exploration of Bruce Wayne’s cinematic legacy has had us thinking of Batman’s long video game journey. So, we’re going on a tour of every Batman game ever made. The good, the bad, and the weird ones. Today, we explore the very start of the rocky, winding road that would one day lead us to the gates of Arkham Asylum…

Batman: Year One (1986 - 1989)

1986 was a turning point in Batman’s long history. It was the moment he would finally shake off the long shadow of the kitschy ‘60s TV series and become the brooding icon he was always meant to be. It was the year that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns detonated our conception of the character in an operatic flash of lightning and violence and psychiatrist jokes.

In a considerably less seismic development, 1986 was also the year British developer Ocean Software published Batman’s first ever video game: a dinky isometric puzzler on the venerable ZX Spectrum.

In the days before a truly global gaming market, developers in the UK had honed their own unique approach to action: stiff, heavy movements, plodding controls, and a curious fondness for anthropomorphic eggs. You might think this an ill-fit for the Batman, the ninja master who strikes quickly with surgical precision and leaps across rooftops to vanish into the night. You would be correct.

The Joker and the Riddler have kidnapped Robin! Batman, trapped in his own cave and stripped of gadgets, must find the seven missing pieces of his trusty Bat-hovercraft to escape and pursue the dastardly duo. To do so, he’ll have to slowly navigate 150 isometric screens populated by traps, puzzles, and monsters, without any offensive capabilities whatsoever. Rather than the ultra-adept master of everything, here Batman is bereft of even basic video game functionality. Elementary video game verbs like “jumping” and “carrying items” require you to find hidden upgrades around the brutally difficult maze, rendered in a neon Zur-En-Arrh nightmare of teals and yellows and purples. A superhero power fantasy it is not.

Such an odd start was only the beginning, as 1988 saw Ocean publish the second of its three Dark Knight games, Batman: The Caped Crusader. The first of many, many sidescrolling action games to come, Caped Crusader consists of two separate scenarios pitting the Dark Knight against the Penguin and Joker. Batman can now kick rats, throw Batarangs, and flail listlessly at the hordes of identical henchmen clogging your path through agonizing, samey-looking mazes.

There’s certainly more sauce on display than Ocean’s previous effort. The game’s main selling point is its unique interface inspired by comic panels, where the screen is divided into narrow boxes through which the characters traverse. It’s an admirable, if not always pleasant, innovation that made a genuine attempt to convey the comic experience, and you can understand why Ocean tried it. Comics were pretty much all Batman was known for at the time, save for Superfriends cartoons and old memories of Adam West. That was about to change.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie was a watershed moment for the character. For the first time in decades there was a definitive Batman in the popular imagination. Game designers finally had something they could work with. Batman: The Movie the game was Ocean’s swan song, and easily the best title of this primordial bunch. The studio slapped Burton’s iconography on a sequence of five minigames, each inspired by a set-piece from the film. The sidescrolling action is vastly improved– Batman can now fight and jump simultaneously as the grappling hook makes its video game debut. More significant is the first appearance of a fast-paced Batmobile shooting gallery, soon to be a franchise staple. There’s even a charming breather on the Bat-computer where Bruce mixes chemicals around, the first real glimpse of the master detective in digital form.

Batman was big business in 1989, and the game was a smash hit across seven different PC platforms, particularly as a pack-in for a best-selling Amiga 500 bundle. The first good Batman game had arrived, but it would be Ocean’s last patrol of Gotham. The British developers would take the back seat, for now, as the license passed to another island nation with its own very distinct approach to game design.

The Sunsoft Rises (1989 - 1991)

Batman is at his best when he is in control, and it’s hard to embody the world’s second-greatest martial artist on the ZX Spectrum’s squishy rubber keyboard. Thankfully, by 1989, Japanese developer Sunsoft had become fully fluent in Famicom, and Batman would be its masterpiece.

The finished NES game bears little resemblance to the Burton movie’s plot, pitting Batman against a bizarre bullpen of deep cut DC criminals like Killer Moth and Electrocutioner. The second-to-last boss is a z-lister named Firebug, and when you finally face the Joker he summons lightning bolts from the sky, a feat, to our knowledge, Jack Nicholson is not capable of in the film. The game has a ton of personality, but it’s not really Tim Burton’s baroque gothic pulp. There’s an almost “Final Fight” vibe to Gotham’s criminal chaos, over-the-top urban combat energy where the final boss taunts you from a video screen in the penultimate level.

Most of these departures are welcome, especially when it comes to feel and mechanics. Batman marches across the screen in a flurry of punches and kicks and three distinct subweapons, including a highly dubious “spear” gun. The Dark Knight leaps from wall to wall like he’s Ryu Hyabusa. Sunsoft’s Batman earns its comparison to Ninja Gaiden not just in feel but in the cinematic cutscenes that punctuate each stage, if you can survive long enough to reach them.

Sunsoft pounced on the huge success of its first Batman game and spread the love to several other platforms over the next year. A perfectly adequate adaptation of Batman for the Sega Genesis skewed more towards the slow and deliberate Shinobi style vs. the twitch mastery of Ninja Gaiden, while a fairly obscure arcade version looked great, but suffered from early beat-em-up awkwardness with hundreds of goons pouring from doors to suck down your life and quarters. Both were notable for their inter-level Bat-vehicle sequences: sidescrolling shmups on Sega’s console and flashy first-person extravaganzas to turn heads at the arcade.

Batman for Game Boy was another totally new game, with miniature sprites of a gun-wielding Dark Knight riddling his tiny foes with bullets. Video games don’t have the best track records when it comes to Batman’s strict aversion to firearms, but Batman on Game Boy is among the more comical dismissals of the trope.

There’s one more Batman game in Sunsoft’s pocket for the first Batman movie rollout, and it’s a darn cute one. In Batman for the PC Engine, the Dark Knight is embodied as an adorably chubby avatar who putters around top down mazes dressed to look like city streets and art museums. Batman scoots around collecting powerups and cleaning paint, twirling bad guys with his Batarangs and booping them away.

We’ve seen a silly-looking Caped Crusader before, but this is very specifically supposed to be Michael Keaton’s intense and raw avenger. This weird little guy, more Bomberman than Batman, is embodying the same person who screams and smashes vases and hooks up with Kim Basinger. The game is harmless fun, with another excellent soundtrack, but the real joy comes from seeing digital stills from the film fade into the cheerful little goblin we control, or watching a chibi sprite coldly send the Joker plummeting to a grisly death.

Pure Dynamite (1991)

Batman Returns was still a year away in 1991, but Sunsoft skipped the line and issued its own sequel. Without a movie to adapt, the team ditched the Burtonian gothic atmosphere in favor of full throttle run-and-gun spectacle. In the West, it was called Return of the Joker, but the Japanese title tells the real story: Dynamite Batman.

Return of the Joker looks and plays like Mega Man, Castlevania, and Contra fell into a vat and emerged as an awesome, amalgam creature with parallax scrolling and enormous sprites. There’s a sequence beneath a blimp that seems like it belongs in Sonic 3, with levels set in snowfields and speeding trains and blazing fast shooter sequences that are giving 16-bit blast processing on the 8-bit NES. Batman’s primary weapon is an arm-mounted cannon, and while it technically isn’t a gun in the traditional sense, slamming powerups into the deadly machine gun on his wrist seems outside the spirit of Batman’s solemn vow. It feels right at home within the context of a Dynamite Batman, however, one who enters boss battles following a fighting-game style versus screen and begins each fight by charging up with red lightning.

The final confrontation with the titular prodigal clown sees the Joker ensconced inside a Dr. Wily spaceship with a ludicrous 250,000 hit points, sending off Sunsoft’s Batman saga in style, even if the publisher wasn’t finished quite yet. Two more bites at the Bat-apple remained.

First came the Game Boy edition of Return of the Joker, which is completely different from its NES namesake. It feels like a hastily repurposed unrelated ninja action title slathered with a bat coat of paint, judging from the Shogun Warriors and samurai the Dark Knight disposes of within.

The Genesis version is perhaps even worse. Farmed out to an American studio under an extremely tight deadline, the 16-bit port, inexplicably rechristened Revenge of the Joker, suffers from clunky controls, muddled graphics, and difficulty that has been increased to the point of aggravation. Even Tommy Tallarico’s soundtrack is a rare miss, with Sega’s gormless Yamaha soundfont unable to compete with the crunching pulsewaves of Sunsoft’s 8-bit output.

Revenge of the Joker sounds and feels like an exhausted sigh from a publisher who had wrung everything it could out of the Burton IP. It was time to move on, and the timing couldn’t be better.

Many Happy Returns (1992)

If 1989 was the year of the Bat, 1992 was the year of the cat, the bird, and the silver-haired industrialist. Burton’s indulgent, uninhibited sequel wasn’t quite as massive as the first, but the marketing machine established in ‘89 managed to churn out an entire starting lineup’s worth of video games.

Nine different Batman Returns games were made by six different developers and released by five different publishers. Nine unique, bespoke games tailored to each system, wildly differing in quality. Today’s IP tie-ins are developed over years at enormous cost and ported to increasingly indistinguishable hardware, but in 1992, it meant whatever six studios could ship before the movie left theaters.

First came Batman Returns on the Sega Genesis, developed by Malibu Interactive. Some of its talent was recruited from former Bat-devs Ocean, but the Batman Returns game they made bore a greater resemblance to Sunsoft’s Genesis offering. It’s a somewhat slow, sidescrolling, punch-kickey platformer with gadgets and grappling and a limited glide. Batman progresses through streets, sewers, and circuses, settings mind-numbingly shared across the entire spectrum of Returns games, though there are some cool setpieces like sliding through the slanted halls of a ruined building.

Sega’s Batman Returns is plenty cinematic, with cool touches like fighting the giant art deco statues from the film as firebreathing bosses and a final battle against Catwoman as the credits roll. But the sound lacks impact, and enemies die not with a gurgle or a thud but a synthesized bleat. It’s a solid if uninspiring package, and if you feel like it lacks automotive action you can pop in the Sega CD version, which adds 3D Batmobile sections and better sound to the original game.

Batman Returns on SNES is a Final Fight clone in cape and cowl, with big sprites, juicy hit stops, and beefy sound effects as you beat the crap out of a legion of identical clowns. You can bash their heads together, hurl them through plate glass windows, or cleverly recreate moments from the movie with your trusty grappling hook. Between the screen-clearing powerups, multiple elevator stages, and enemies with their own named lifebars, it’s a Konami belt-scroller through and through, but it’s far from the best. Boss battles are a bit of a bore as you face the Penguin and the Catwoman multiple times throughout the relatively short runtime.

It’s hard to say which platform had the better Batman. Like the other dueling licensed games of the era, your decision will likely lean towards the console you grew up with. If you bore allegiance to neither SNES nor Genesis, however, there were plenty of other Batman Returns games available. They just weren’t going to be as good.

Konami’s own NES effort is commendable, a shrunken-down beat-em-up in the mold of Double Dragon. The similarly obsolete Sega Master System and Game Gear each received their own fairly-decent 8-bit platformers, while Atari’s handheld Lynx featured an extremely simple side-scroller that’s barely more complex than a flip-phone game. On personal computers, an infamous Amiga version ranks among the lowest dregs of Bat-games, a buggy, nonresponsive mess that’s entirely unfun and unmemorable beyond giving you permission to punt poodles.

Rather than another 2D platformer, the MS-DOS version from developer Spirit of Discovery was a point-and-click adventure. Batman walks around the screen like he’s in a Lucasfilm game, though the Dark Knight isn’t one for witty banter, preferring shambling fisticuffs to insult swordfighting. It’s an odd, interesting precursor to the kinds of narrative adventures future technology would make possible. It boasts some pretty clever detective action: solving puzzles, staking out crime scenes, and interrogating crooks interrupted by agonizing combat sections. The Batcomputer is your best friend here, poring through archives and “video” footage to unravel the Penguin’s bid for mayor and expose the evils of Max Schreck. It’s a rare excursion into the side of Batman’s job that doesn’t involve giving people concussions, and one that would be explored heavily in the years to come, when Batman would finally become a video game trailblazer, rather than the victim of countless tie-ins.

Our exploration of the history of Batman games continues tomorrow, when we'll take a look at how the Dark Knight coped with his greatest nemesis: suits with nipples.

GTA 6 pre-orders were rumored to go live today, May 18, but it looks like those reports were inaccurate.

Last week, GTA 6 fans lost their collective mind after reports emerged that Best Buy had potentially leaked the game’s pre-order date. During a livestream, YouTuber Frogboyx1gaming appeared to receive an email from Best Buy to his affiliate account signalling a pre-order campaign for GTA 6 that would run from May 18-21. The suggestion was that GTA 6 pre-orders would go live on May 18, potentially alongside GTA 6 Trailer 3.

IGN had asked Best Buy for comment but received no response. Still, there was plenty of doubt cast on the rumor, and, as we pointed out last week, we’d been here before, many times. Some GTA 6 fans actually believed in a Trailer 3 release date prediction that came from someone who charted the planetary positions for every single Rockstar Games trailer released since 2007. That turned out to be inaccurate, too.

Now, the main administrator of GTA Forums has posted to say a verified source at a European distribution company “confirmed there's no pre-orders,” insisting Best Buy had made a mistake.

As you’d expect, the GTA 6 fan community, already close to breaking point waiting for some sort of announcement or reveal for the game, has gone into meltdown — and yes, there are a number of angry posts from people who had come to expect pre-orders would go live today, despite the fact there was no official announcement that Rockstar.

The upshot of all this is that the wait goes on not just for GTA 6 pre-orders to go live, but a fresh look at the game, either in trailer or screenshot form. We still don’t know how much the game will cost. All we have to go on are rather vague comments from Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, who’s talked about GTA 6 marketing kicking off this summer, and the game itself offering incredible value whenever anyone asks him how much GTA 6 will cost.

Certainly, the wait for a new GTA 6 reveal has gone on longer than anyone expected. It’s been over a year since Trailer 2 came out. Trailer 1 came out three years ago, in 2023. Meanwhile, GTA 6 itself has suffered two official delays, first to May 2026 after it was penciled in for fall 2025, then to November 2026. In a new interview, Zelnick suggested GTA 6 was internally targeting an even earlier release window — around spring 2025 — before it was announced for fall 2025.

GTA 6 is significantly behind schedule, then, but Zelnick has gone on the record to say he’s keen to give developer Rockstar everything it needs to achieve “perfection.” And there is of course pressure on the game to deliver just that and break every sales record going.

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Take-Two is estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far on GTA 6. In an interview with the publication, Zelnick wouldn’t say how much exactly, but did admit “it was expensive.” To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie's recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter's life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.

At least Zelnick sounds really, really confident that GTA 6 won't be delayed yet again and will actually come out on November 19. When he was asked how he deals with not knowing when the game will come out, given his commitment to giving the developers all the time they need, he replied, firmly: "November 19th, I do know. It’s been announced."

We're now just six months from that date.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.