Invincible’s fourth season performs a much-needed reset, setting a definitive course for its character arcs right from the word go. In the first 6 of its 8 episodes, the show’s signature gore is matched by its emotional brutality, as it confronts questions that have been hovering in the background by finally placing them front-and-center – namely, is Mark/Invincible really like his father? Can Nolan, the former Omni-Man, ever be forgiven for his crimes? And is it truly possible for them to become better people?

All of this drama unfolds against the backdrop of the looming Viltrumite War, an arc in Robert Kirkman’s source comics (published by Image). In it, the Coalition of Planets – led by Viltrumite turncoat Thaedus – finally takes on the remains of the ruthless Empire, led by this season’s villain, Grand Regent Thragg (voiced by Lee Pace with an icy chill). Before the conflict begins in earnest, and sooner than you might expect, we’re re-introduced to Mark on Earth as he recovers from Conquest’s beatdown at the end of Season 3. The swarthy, one-armed sadist is secretly being kept alive by Cecil and the GDA (Global Defense Agency), but as far as Mark is aware, he killed the invading warrior in a fit of rage for what he did to Eve, and he’s since decided to do whatever is necessary to keep his loved ones safe…even if it means taking a life.

The Mark we meet in Season 4 has a much harder edge, and Steven Yeun plays him with a withdrawn quality as he begins to wonder whether this is who he is or who he wants to be. As always, the Grayson family drama is the series’ strong suit, with a now-teenaged Oliver (Mark’s half-brother) eager to take up a superhero mantle and reclaim the Omni-Man logo, while their mother Debbie just wants to live a normal life with her ordinary boyfriend, Paul. Mark’s life is further complicated by his relationship with Eve, whose parents have some understandable concerns about their daughter nearly dying whenever she’s around Mark. It certainly doesn’t help that her own powers hit a bit of a snag for some very interesting reasons.

This time around, existential threats are the name of the game, with Mark’s new fatalistic worldview coming into immediate conflict with a number of major villains that force him into ethical dilemmas. There are super-smart dinosaurs who want to end the world, nuclear power-hungry goddesses, and yes, even more mind-controlling Martian Sequids and interdimensional Flaxans. But if anything in Season 4 ever feels like a retread, it usually has a purpose; if existing threats keep coming back, surely Mark and his comrades will eventually be forced into questioning their methods. In fact, the most interesting thing about all this is the idea that Mark, with his new “shoot first, ask questions later” credo, might actually be right…though this ends up being challenged in some unexpected ways.

For the most part, the show’s repetitive elements are purposeful, save for a lore-heavy detour to a fiery, subterranean realm in Episode 4 alongside demon detective Damien Darkblood. This sounds much more exciting in theory, even if it does feature the great Bruce Campbell in a surprising role. If something doesn’t fully click this season, it’s usually because it isn’t quite as strong as the central drama of Mark’s shifting morality.

For instance, the other Earthbound heroes – aka the Guardians of the Globe – and their street-level villains, the Order, don’t have the most interesting things to do. But given how far their subplots meandered last season, this might be for the best. The show also still retains some flaws from previous years, like an over-reliance on celebrity names and traditional screen actors who don’t quite have the right skill set for animation, resulting in some dramatic dead air. For what it’s worth, the creators seem to rely far more on what already works about the show, and they find new ways to complicate Nolan’s deep space self-reflections.

Far-flung from those he betrayed, Nolan gets to spend some much needed time with Allen, Seth Rogen’s jovial and forgiving one-eyed alien hero, who makes for a fantastic foil to J.K. Simmons’ gradually-reforming antihero. As established in prior episodes, the pulp novels Nolan wrote on Earth hold clues to real allies and weapons that could be used to defeat the Viltrumites, so his scenes with Allen take on a similarly pulpy, fetch-quest quality, as they’re joined by characters inspired by everything from mecha anime to ’50s American sci-fi to Greek and Hindu mythology. By the time the war kicks off and the show grows in scale, it feels like every possible subgenre has been roped into it.

However, what works best about Nolan’s arc is what we slowly learn about his people, especially in Episode 2, which makes for a series highlight. The Viltrumites are still cold and cult-like, but the losses they’ve endured over the centuries can’t help but bring to mind real-world stories like the COVID pandemic and even modern geopolitics, where nation states use the horrors of past genocides to justify carrying out atrocities in the present. The villains are by no means made likable, but their twisted outlook is in its own way empathetic. They end up reflecting key comic works like Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, a major theme of which is the idea that suffering doesn’t necessarily make you a better person; it just makes you suffer.

This feeds wonderfully into Nolan’s character arc, which is rooted in the question of just how much of his Viltrumite self he’s willing or even able to shed in search of absolution. But it isn’t all doom and gloom despite these incredibly heavy themes. Invincible has always skirted the line of superhero parody, and while it’s gotten far too serious on that front to start joking about the genre again, it does feature a delightful send-up of Star Trek: The Next Generation during Nolan’s galactic pursuit.

As usual, the montages set to popular needle drops help capture a melancholy mood while acting as connective tissue between major events. This especially applies to scenes of space travel, which the show remembers takes time, affording major characters like Nolan, Mark, and Oliver some much needed downtime in the process. Things come to a head this season, with inevitable meetings and reunions fans have long been waiting for, but the series earns each and every one of them and immerses viewers in some of the most rigorous drama Invincible has seen thus far. The show has carnage for days…but more importantly, it backs it up with meaning.

Full spoilers follow for Primal Season 3, Episode 10, “An Echo of Eternity,” which is available on Adult Swim now and debuts on HBO Max on March 16.

There you have it. Spear and his family finally got their happy ending. But man, was it touch and go there for a bit!

“An Echo of Eternity” does what was unthinkable at the start of the season, not just returning Spear fully to life, but also reuniting him with Fang and Mira and all the kids too. Indeed, the episode title is a play on the Season 2 finale title, “Echoes of Eternity,” only that was the story that seemed to kill off Spear once and for all.

You can argue, and fans no doubt will for a long time to come, about whether or not it was the right move for Genndy Tartakovsky to undo the beautiful but tragic ending of Season 2. But as far as I’m concerned, Tartakovsky – and Spear – earned the right after everything the character has gone through over the course of these past 10 episodes. And if this is truly the end for Spear and the rest, then I can live with that.

But let’s back up a bit. Tartakovsky and his team really ratchet up the tension throughout the episode, first as Spear searches for his family, who he knows are in danger. Finding puddles of blood and, even more terrifying, the tiny, bloody footprints of a baby, he seems to be able to piece together – look how far he’s come from the mindless corpse from the beginning of this season! – the fight that has taken place here, right down to what led to the severed panther-creature arm, and then its disemboweled corpse. But when he does find his family, it’s not a great situation.

Fang is pretty torn up, with Mira tending to her wounds. The slight quiver of Spear’s lips gives away not just his concern for his old pal, but also his emotion in seeing everyone else is OK. He even speaks: “Mira”! It’s not the first time he’s said her name, but it is certainly something that he saves for important moments. Unfortunately, the volcanic creeps (who ironically enough have assisted in Spear’s resurrection) almost immediately show up with blow darts that knock the whole gang out, and take them to fight in their cursed arena.

After feeling the joy of Spear being reunited with his family, to see those pasty-faced volcanic bastards pouring their nasty elixir into the fam’s mouths… well, I couldn’t wait to see them all be smited. And while my initial assumption was that Spear and Fang and the rest would take them out, it turns out nature would handle that instead. With the volcano erupting around them, the vicious fight that ensues between the enhanced (is that the right word?) Fang, Mira, Blue and Red Jr. is tough to watch. They really go at each other, and ironically enough it’s Spear – who has gone from brainless to being the only one with a brain now – who has to save them all.

Bear with me for a sec as I speculate. Is Tartakovsky using this sequence to comment on what many families have gone through in recent years, split apart and learning to hate one other because of some outside, malevolent force which has only their own best interests at heart? Yeah, that’s a read, and maybe it’s a stretch, but as I saw Mira and Fang go at one another – two of the coolest ladies on TV at the moment who have grown to be sisters over the course of the show – I couldn’t help but think about how many of us have turned, or are being compelled to turn, on one another.

But Spear is able to rise above it all, and man is it a great moment when, having freed Fang from her hate-filled trance, he jumps atop her once again and the two strike that amazing pose of victory. It turned out we did get our face-off between the pair this season; I just didn’t anticipate that it would be a once-again-human Spear versus a Hulked-out Fang.

Which takes us to the episode’s end, where things certainly might get some viewers a bit misty-eyed as Spear takes in his renewed life – his baby, his friend (or more?) Mira, and his best and greatest ally, Fang, and her pups. That Spear has come back to his artwork time again to tell the story of his evolving family – both those he has lost, and those he has found – has to be some kind of meta-commentary coming from Tartakovsky, and I love it.

By the final scene, which is an exact duplicate of Season 2’s last scene where, some years in the future, the matured Blue and Red Jr., plus Fang, Mira, and Spear and Mira’s daughter all enter from offscreen, the choice Tartakovsky has made is clear. Yeah, Spear got that happy ending. Unlike the Season 2 version, this shot goes on for a few seconds longer as we see that Spear had been there all along with his family. It just took some doing getting there.

Questions and Notes From Anachronistic History

• Spear’s fully back to himself, including his hand being healed, in that time jump sequence.
• I could’ve done with seeing a few more (all?) the volcano people falling into lava for what they did to Fang and the rest.
• Man, just when it seemed like Spear’s pterosaur could’ve been a permanent addition, the thing disappeared. I guess Fang wouldn’t have been a fan of it anyway.
• Spear was right – his daughter loved her dolly!
• How much did it hurt to see Blue and Red Jr. fighting with each other?
• Will there be a Primal Season 4? We don’t know yet. But I’ve really enjoyed talking about the show with you for the past 10 weeks, and I hope we get the chance to do it again if and when Tartakovsky has another idea for where to take the Primal family next.

2019’s Ready or Not was a breath of fresh air: a simple, savage game of hide and seek that announced not just directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella, the filmmaking team known as Radio Silence, but also star Samara Weaving as exciting talents to watch. Radio Silence and Weaving return with an attempt to recapture the simple magic of the first movie, while also expanding the scope of the storytelling to make room for an international cabal of power players all fighting for the chance to sacrifice their souls to Satan in return for unlimited power. The screaming relevance of satirizing oligarchy in these super chill and totally normal times aside, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is less a brand new game, and more a stab at seeing how a second round of the same thing plays out. There may be more players and pieces on the board, but it’s an expansion that doesn’t add all that much to the core set.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up in the immediate aftermath of Grace (Samara Weaving) besting the Le Domas family at their own twisted game. In the vacuum left behind, a handful of other elite families send representatives to battle it out for the right to win “Mr. Le Bail’s favor” or, more plainly, the honor of being Satan’s favorite nepo baby and the unlimited power and wealth associated with said honor. And that battle takes the form of… another round of hide and seek with Grace as the target. Among wealthy competitors played by the likes of Nestor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, and Olivia Cheng, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy’s siblings Ursula and Titus Danforth emerge as clear frontrunners, with the homefield advantage of having the game take place on resort grounds owned by their ailing father, Chester Danforth (played by the always most welcome David Cronenberg).

Samara Weaving’s reprisal of Grace is the standout element of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and by a wide margin at that. By the end of the first movie, Weaving was channeling some really fun, grounded rage toward how fast her happy ending (literally) disintegrated before her eyes, and the way that momentum is carried into and maintained throughout Here I Come is seriously impressive. It’s a physically and emotionally demanding set of circumstances that Weaving navigates with a ton of energy and enthusiasm, and especially with how familiar Here I Come’s beats start to feel, at times that feels like the only thing keeping the movie from going off the rails. Here I Come’s big move for shaking up Grace’s status quo is the addition of her previously-unmentioned younger sister Faith played with zip by Kathryn Newton, who gets swept into the mix while checking on Grace in the hospital. Newton tempers her natural pluckiness with Faith’s considerable resentment toward Grace over the circumstances of their parting years prior.

With Grace an old pro at hide and seek at this point, Olpin and Gillett use Faith to get a second crack at first reactions to the brutal swings of the game, but the drama between Grace and Faith otherwise falls flat. Faith’s grudge is unconvincingly written and, in its worst moments, leads to frustrating decisions on her part that seem totally out of step with her circumstances. That sibling rivalry is superficially mirrored by the Danforths, but Gellar and Hatosy each feel stranded in roles that call for cool and calculating, but not much else. Like all of the other hunters, the Danforths are there to stand in for all one-percenters using their power to oppress the rest of the world, which is a good place to start for a new crop of villains, but much as it is in our everyday life, that dynamic becomes a tiring metaphor to live in once it becomes clear that Here I Come doesn’t have anything more interesting to say with it.

This new phase of the game is presided over by Elijah Wood’s unnamed Attorney, who’s purely a functionary here but one imbued with a nice, light touch of mischief in the vein of House on Haunted Hill’s Vincent Price or Clue’s Tim Curry performances. The Attorney reads from the comically-large rule book like a Bible, but the foregrounding of arcane rules, twisty politics, and agreements bound in blood by this organization – this High Council – all feel painfully duplicative of John Wick’s High Table, especially as the first film kept these elements mostly relegated to tossed-off asides from the Le Domas family. Rules are, of course, meant to be bent and broken, but Ready or Not 2: Here I Come demonstrates frustrating inconsistency with its willingness to do so. It’s established early on that hunters are only allowed to use weapons from the time period their families made their gambit with “Mr. Le Bail”, but it doesn’t take long to feel like a free-for-all of hunters using whatever’s around to get the job done. The script does make jokes about this - like when the Attorney gives a cheeky “maybe that’s a bad idea” look to one character debating how much to rely on modern technology - but in practice, it feels an aspect of the script Olpin and Gillett are willing to sweep under the rug whenever it becomes inconvenient to the plot.

The decision to model Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’s structure so closely after its predecessor holds this sequel back from feeling surprising or inventive at nearly every turn, forcing Grace into the familiar rhythms of avoiding detection, fighting for her life, and deadpanning about the horrific circumstances she’s just endured in a way that feels like being caught in limbo, but probably not in the way Olpin and Gillett were aiming for. Here I Come does diverge into somewhat new territory for its finale, but it’s only able to get there on the back of a sacrifice Grace makes which feels totally out of step with - at this point - nearly two movies’ worth of character development on her part.

Despite the warmed-over plot, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in the carnage of the game itself. Most of the competitors are pretty inept and cowardly, so there are some big laughs when they fumble with their weapons or decide to screw each other over to protect themselves. Maia Jae’s Francesca scores the movie’s best action set-piece: a messy and hilarious duel with Weaving’s Grace in a ballroom that plays up a satisfying bit of backstory the two share. Olppin and Gillett have quite the knack for infusing action with comedy (something that’ll bode well for their upcoming work on The Mummy 4), and even in stretches where Here I Come feels like it’s repeating its predecessor’s story, the specifics of the various injuries and deaths are often well-pitched. Here I Come does tend to overrely on the spontaneous combustion gag which closed out the last movie with a bang, deploying the goopy explosions pretty freely throughout the movie when it comes time for Mr. Le Bail’s disciples to bite it. Given the vast majority of Ready or Not left the supernatural aspect of the story as an open question, seeing the whole Le Domas family ‘splode was a delightful and earned surprise that becomes a little more tiresome every time it happens in Here I Come.

The fact that Slay the Spire 2's Early Access debut plays so similarly to the groundbreaking original deckbuilding roguelike makes this one of the easiest recommendations I've ever given. If you never played it, you're missing out and should jump into its turn-based combat immediately if the concept is remotely appealing to you; if you've sunk 1,000-plus hours into the original like I have, the sequel's new character classes and extensive reworking of the founding trio make going up against its even tougher bosses feel refreshed and less predictable. On top of that, the novel co-op mode gives us a new way to play and share all the thrilling highs and tragic lows of a great run. It may not be the most ambitious sequel when it comes to reinvention, but this is an excellent reinvigoration of a brilliant game.

After a week of playing, I've now clocked a little over 43 hours of Slay the Spire 2 and have completed full, three-act runs as each of its five classes – but of course the ever-escalating Ascension difficulty modifiers and unlockable cards and relic upgrades mean I've only really scratched the surface of the challenges it offers. The Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect (my personal favorite) all play similarly to their old incarnations, to the point where most of their established strategies will still work just fine, but now there are more options available that let you take them in different directions. The Silent, for instance, now has cards that include the Sly label; discarding these has the same effect as playing them (much like Monster Train's Offering cards), so you can use that to make a build that goes a lot farther on fewer energy points per turn. That's part of why Slay the Spire 2 seems much less dependent on upgrading your energy limit than the original, where if you didn't end up with a way to do so you were likely to have a bad run.

The new characters, as you'd expect, play completely differently. I'm a fan of the Necrobinder, a glowing skeleton with a giant hand as a sidekick. Its Doom mechanic effectively lets you attack both sides of an enemy’s health bar at once (they’ll die after the rising Doom level passes their falling HP), and your buddy Osty serves as both a second layer of defense that absorbs damage after your armor fails, and an attack that starts small but can be built up to devastating levels. There are also the Soul cards that can be extracted from enemies and then used to draw an all but endless number of cards from your deck to keep raining down attacks. After a few experimental runs I was finding satisfying success with those new tools.

What about the other new class, the Regent, you ask? Well, this starfish-faced royal riding around on a weird living throne with legs became my white whale. It took me nearly 40 tries over more than 15 hours to finally pull off a win thanks to lucking into an extremely powerful combo of cards and relic modifiers. When he clicks, he really clicks: by quickly building up his special Star currency at the start of a fight I was able to unleash some wildly powerful spells that hit as many times as I had Stars to fuel it. That was then boosted by one of the sequel’s new card upgrades that made it do 50% more damage at the cost of inflicting two damage on myself. Add in a few relics that inflicted the Vulnerable status on all enemies in the first turn and gave me Vigor for +8 damage on my first attack, and I ended up annihilating the third and final boss on the second turn – and it only took that long because this particular boss has a multi-stage mechanic that prevents you from killing it in one.

All of my prior attempts, though, ended much less spectacularly. I had limited luck with the Forge mechanic that summons and then builds up a floating sword (it's expensive to cast the attack and the sword has to be re-drawn before you can use it again) and I nearly succeeded on a run that looped an attack that places itself back on top of the draw pile. There are also some risky mechanics around filling your deck with junk debris so that you can then transform them into disposable minion attack or defense cards, or just use a card that does damage based on how many cards you’ve created. So the Regent has plenty of options and mechanics to play around with, I just found them trickier to use effectively than the other characters.

That said, I've seen other people say that he's their new favorite and their best character by far. I think that speaks to the way Slay the Spire 2 is currently balanced: it's tougher than the original, and perhaps a bit too tailored to an elite group of players with a very specific set of skills – the type who'd crawl over broken glass to playtest a sequel to Slay the Spire. But smoothing out that experience for everybody is what Early Access is all about, and it's not as though I wasn't having fun banging my head against that wall until it finally, cathartically crumbled.

It also took me a little while to realize that my playstyle had to change a bit when it came to choosing my path through each act's map. The approach I've used successfully in hundreds of Daily Climb challenges (which of course return in the sequel) is based primarily on going wherever I'd get to take on the most Elite miniboss battles, and then beat the loot out of them. Those extra relics can be the foundation of some incredible builds. However, that hasn’t served me well in the sequel because the risks of tackling these powerful enemies have outweighed the rewards. One of my least favorite to encounter when I'm at less than 100 percent strength can only take 20 damage per turn no matter what, so you're in for a drawn-out fight even if you lead with your big guns. Go up against too many like that in a run and you're in trouble: even if they don't kill you outright, since your health is persistent, the damage you take there could doom you in the next fight. So, I've had to rethink my strategy and pick my battles more carefully – which I must admit, I prefer to what had become an automatic process for me.

Instead, I’ve started to prioritize things like special events, some of which can give you a sort of quest that spans across acts (think a more formal version of the first game’s Red Mask interaction). I've gotten a map in Act 1 that led me to a huge treasure pile in Act 2, and a key in one act that opens a chest in the next. There's also a bird egg that must be hatched at a rest site (so it comes at the opportunity cost of not healing yourself or upgrading a card). Those are represented by unplayable cards until their quest is resolved and the reward handed out, so there's at least a minor consequence to carrying them with you because they take up space in your deck and hand that could've gone to something useful in the moment.

There's another notable change in that instead of just picking a modifier from the weird big whale thing Neow in the beginning of a run, each act begins with a similar choice between three rewards that often include significant downsides. These have probably been the biggest bellwethers for how a run will go for me – if I get a major one, like something that grants extra energy, I'm going to have a much better shot than something that grants me a normal card reward and a random potion. It's another roll of the dice, yes, but one that's thrilling to win big but doesn't take the legs out from under you if you don't.

Other than the new, more lively art style that includes a lot more combat and death animations, the big feature that truly sets Slay the Spire 2 apart from the original is the up-to-four-player co-op mode. It's a great test of how well you and your friends can work together and control your chaotic impulses. Within each turn of combat, it's a real-time free-for-all where everybody plays their cards at once, so if you're not coordinating your attacks over voice chat it gets crazy extremely quickly as the cards stack up and wait their turns for their animations to play out, and potential attacks are wasted on enemies that're already effectively dead. If you plan on getting anywhere as a team you'll definitely want to make sure you're taking a moment to think things through, because Slay the Spire 2 balances out the presence of multiple players by dramatically increasing enemy hitpoints (and their attacks hit your whole team at once), so you'll need to focus fire to take out priority targets quickly. Given there's no matchmaking to find random people to play with, though, it's safe to say you'll be in some form of communication with your teammates. (Sadly there's no local same-screen co-op.)

Things are made a little more forgiving in co-op in that downed players are automatically revived to 1HP after a battle (assuming at least one person survives) and you can use your rest site action to heal a teammate instead of yourself. You also get the same number of random artifacts as you have players each time they're handed out, which lets you choose the best fit for each of your builds (with any disputes settled randomly). That gives you a major leg up in how you want to build your character, compared to simply having to take whatever single item pops out of a chest. Each character also has multiplayer-specific cards that allow them to help out their teammates, such as giving them a random card to play in combat or summoning an Osty for everybody.

Of course, the difficulty ramps up pretty dramatically as well, and requires even more planning of your order of operations than you have to do alone. It's deliberately designed to make you and your teammates hash things out in conversation: You can't see a teammate's entire hand, but they can mouse over one card at a time and it'll be displayed over their character's head so you can see what they're talking about. I also love how you can draw on the map now, plotting out where you're going as a group or just doodling. (That works in single-player as well, if you want to leave yourself a note.)

I will say that it would be great if Mega Crit could find a better solution for what happens when someone in your party has to bail mid-run, because right now your options are to save and quit until they come back or that person's character just stops and you have to abandon your game with nothing to show for it. To be fair, a typical run isn't going to go more than an hour and everybody should know what they're getting into before setting out on a group adventure, but things happen.

Another reason it's so easy to recommend Slay the Spire 2 even in its Early Access state is that it at least appears to be largely "complete" in terms of how much content is here. Who knows how much bigger Mega Crit plans to make it before 1.0 (we can, I think, at least expect a fourth act to be tacked onto the end, and alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 to match up with the two versions of Act 1 that are already available), but even if it were left as it is today it would be no slouch. Outside of the balance changes we've been told to expect, the only real indication that this is an Early Access game is the goofy MS Paint-style placeholder art you'll see on a handful of cards and in the progression tree that serves up bite-sized bits of lore (which, like the first game, is fairly nonsensical, vague, and silly) as you unlock new cards, potions, and relics. And the one significant bug I encountered that ended a multiplayer run because I'd gotten too many potion slots has been patched out already – other than that, it's performed pretty much flawlessly.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 10!

The best episodes of The Pitt are nothing if not an ordeal. They leave you physically and emotionally exhausted after an hour of watching these intrepid doctors and nurses frantically scramble to stem the tide of human suffering. Watching the series is equal parts stressful and rewarding, and rarely has that been more true than with Season 2, Episode 10. This latest installment fires on all cylinders as it chronicles another harrowing hour at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

I won’t even bury the lede here - I think “4:00 PM” is the first 10-worthy installment of Season 2. It’s not that this episode is drastically different from its predecessors. Given the way that this series unfolds in real-time across a single day, there’s obviously a strong throughline linking each and every episode. But all the moving parts combine in a subtle way to create what is easily the most harrowing and gripping installment of Season 2 so far.

The big development in “4:00 PM” involves a new influx of patients injured from a malfunctioning waterslide. That in itself yields plenty of compelling drama. We get the woman with the severed leg (a subplot that benefits from a bit of black humor involving Ogilvie [Lucas Iverson] fumbling over said leg). We get the father more concerned about the whereabouts of his son than his own serious injuries. And we get the mystery of whether the critically injured, potentially paralyzed child is that son. All of this combines to add even more urgency to an already frantic ER.

This drama is only intensified by the fact that several of the doctors are beginning to reach their respective breaking points. Obviously, Dr. Mohan’s panic attack is the most visible sign that things are starting to break down. That scene is easily the highlight of the episode. With the way the sound cuts out and we follow Samira as she’s hyperventilating and being surrounded by angry patients, it’s all too easy to feel her desperation and claustrophobia. This scene brings to mind Dr. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) similarly intense psychological breakdown from Season 1. That’s one of the real strengths of The Pitt. It makes you feel the immense toll this job takes on people in a way few medical dramas can rival.

Speaking of Robby, this episode is very unflattering in its depiction of his handling of the Samira situation. It’s a nice change to see Robby cast in a more antagonistic light, particularly because it allows Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) to emerge as the voice of reason in all this chaos. The season could use a little more of that.

It’s also great seeing the simmering rivalry between Dr. Langdon (Frank Ball) and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) come to a head in Episode 10. As before, there’s not a lot of overt squabbling between the two; Santos simply responds to every order and interaction with a steadily building dose of passive-aggressive arrogance. Briones and Ball both deliver strong performances here, and you can feel the battle raging between them just beneath the surface.

As fun as that tension is, it’s also a relief to see Santos finally called out for her unprofessional behavior. I noted last week that I’m not really feeling the romantic entanglement between Santos and Dr. Garcia (Alexandra Metz), but this episode does make better use of the pairing as Garcia rips Santos a new one. Who would have thought this sharp-tongued surgeon would emerge as the voice of reason and decorum?

Episode 10 also makes great use of the Roxie (Brittany Allen) subplot as a counterpoint to the bigger, louder drama unfolding in the ER. These scenes are quieter and far more moody, dealing with a different side of emergency medicine and a patient who finally seems ready to die. Allen’s moments are as intense and grueling as anything else in this episode, just in a slightly different, more low-key way. It’s impossible not to be moved by Roxie’s struggle and the ways in which her family members are trying to put a brave face on it all. Javadi’s (Shabana Azeez) brief meltdown feels only too appropriate here.

At this point, I like to check in every week with how the series is faring on the Ogilvie front, as he’s slowly developed into the show’s most frustrating character over the past couple of months. Fortunately, things are definitely beginning to look up here. For one thing, there’s the aforementioned black humor involving Ogilvie dealing with the severed leg. It’s enough just to watch him squirm and suffer a bit. But more importantly, we’re finally starting to get a better sense of Ogilvie as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations of his own, and not just as a self-righteous jerk with an empathy problem. There’s still a way to go before Iverson’s character feels as well-rounded as the rest of the main cast, but the show is finally trending in the right direction there.

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 10, “Rubincon,” which is available on Paramount+ now.

Starfleet Academy closes out its first season with a decent if not thrilling wrap up to last week’s big cliffhanger, a tale that accentuates both what’s great about the show and what can also be its biggest weakness.

By the end of the previous episode, “300th Night,” the gang was in a jam, with the entire Federation surrounded by an array of Omega-47 mines that threatened to detonate and thereby damage subspace for potentially millions of years, ensuring a new Burn-like era for the quadrant. With the USS Athena on the wrong side of the mines, it falls to Captain Ake (Holly Hunter) and the cadets to save the day (of course)... and when Ake is abducted by the Venari Ral, it’s up to the kids to get the job done (with an assist from the delightful Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno).

Putting aside the fairly ludicrous science involved in surrounding the whole Federation with mines – like, imagine not just surrounding a planet, or a solar system, but many, many solar systems – the drama onboard the Athena plays pretty well here, as each cadet must take a station on the starship and work a problem. Darem takes the helm, Genesis is at ops (and then the conn!), Jay-Den heads up medical, and so on. Not every character gets the full spotlight this week, of course, but each is at least afforded some fun bit of business.

Not surprisingly, Caleb (Sandro Rosta) receives the most attention this time out, not just in his “learning moment” scene with Reno, but also later with Tarima (Zoë Steiner) as the two reconnect telepathically – and consensually this time – in order to find Caleb’s mom and, along the way, chart the (literal) course to the aforementioned saving of the day. Rosta also gets to participate in the climactic scene of the episode with Hunter, Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka, and Tatiana Maslany’s Anisha, but more on that in a sec.

As always with this show, the charisma and performances of the actors playing the cadets is really the driving force of the episode. From Caleb/Tarima to Genesis/Sam and even to a quick glimpse of Caleb and Jay-Den having a moment, Starfleet Academy lives or dies thanks to these guys. When something doesn’t make sense plot-wise, or where a scene gets too confusing due to technobabble, it doesn’t matter quite as much because of their charm.

Unfortunately, not as successful this week is the thread involving The Doctor (Robert Picardo). While this aspect of the story starts off strongly, with The Doctor pulling out his old mobile emitter from his Voyager days and using it to essentially “become” the Athena, and thereby save it from destruction by concealing it holographically, the resulting scrambling of the character for the rest of the episode doesn’t play that well. His gibberish talk feels a bit like, well, gibberish scripting, and it’s also somewhat off-putting how Sam (Kerrice Brooks) is now calling him Dad left and right. Yes, I know that they spent 17 years together from their perspective as he raised her back in “The Life of the Stars,” but since we as the audience only saw that happen in a brief montage, it’s kind of jarring to now just accept this new dynamic between them.

Also just generally jarring is the other half of the episode involving Hunter, Giamatti, and Maslany. Having apprehended and taken the two women back to the Athena’s engineering drive section (the ship separated last week during a crisis moment), Nus Braka is holding a show trial for Captain Ake, her guilt predetermined, but with Maslany’s Anisha serving as his trump card; he knows Caleb’s mom hates and resents Ake enough that she will help sell his case against the Starfleeter. Last week I speculated that Anisha might actually still be working for Braka, and I’m glad that this episode finds a more nuanced approach to that concept. Anisha may hate Braka, but she hates Ake more.

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi and the episode’s writers try something interesting here with the idea of Braka broadcasting the trial for all the galaxy to see, but it ultimately plays more as a gimmick than anything else, particularly with the jokey news tickers. Yes, I get the idea of poking fun at our own 21st-century media environment, but it’s too surface level to really bring much to the story.

Overall, the trial portion of the episode tends to give in to the side of Starfleet Academy that can be more base – it’s big and loud and not particularly subtle in its storytelling. And unfortunately, while I had been hoping that the rivalry between Ake and Braka would culminate in some choice scenes between the two Oscar-adjacent actors, it just didn’t pan out this season. Ironically enough, Maslany winds up being the most compelling of the three in the climactic scenes, while Giamatti doesn’t seem able to veer away from the mustache-twirling, even after the reveal that all of his character’s hate is the result of a mere misperception he had as a child. It’s too bad and a disappointing outcome for this character, as well as his dynamic with Hunter’s Ake.

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• “I think I have to pee.”
• When did Jett Reno become one of my favorite modern Star Trek characters, exactly?
• Who are those ne’er-do-wells in the gallery watching the trial? And boy, does Starfleet need to head out and do some space-copping.
• I’m sorry, but I just don’t care for the design approach on the 32nd century starships. I’ve tried to like them! The Athena is cool though.
• Did you catch the reference to Federation President President Rillak on the news ticker? That’s the character played by Chelah Horsdal on Star Trek: Discovery.
• The closing credits “yearbook” approach is fun.
• Will Braka or Anisha be back in the second season? It feels like their stories are basically finished at this point, doesn’t it?

[Editor’s Note: Minishoot' Adventures was first released on PC in 2024, but we did not review it at that time, so we have taken its recent port to Nintendo Switch 2 as an opportunity to do so now.]

Minishoot’ Adventures answers a question I never would have thought to ask in a thousand years: What if you mixed classic Zelda with a twin-stick shooter? Developer SoulGame Studio’s take on that combination is an absolute delight. Between the silky smooth controls, your spaceship-shaped hero’s growing repertoire of abilities, and a top-down world that opens up at a satisfying pace, I loved all 10 hours it took me to roll credits. That felt like a perfect length, even though I would’ve gladly kept playing if it had offered more.

SoulGame Studio makes absolutely no effort to hide Minishoot’ Adventures’ Hyrulean inspiration. Just like Zelda, the overworld is populated with enemies, caves, trees, waterways, and areas you can see but can’t reach until you unlock a new ability. Your health is displayed as a row of hearts in the upper corner of the screen, and you can add more by finding heart pieces hidden around the world. If that’s not proof enough, just travel one screen down from your home base and you’ll find an exact replica of the starting screen from The Legend of Zelda on NES. While an uncharitable interpretation might consider this stealing from Nintendo, it all comes off as a loving homage. The developers have used familiar ingredients to create a new, twin-stick shooting-infused dish that’s different enough to stand on its own.

Instead of an elfin boy, you play as Minishoot’, a small beige ship that exhibits a surprising amount of personality thanks to the cartoonish art and animation. That odd apostrophe in the ship’s name is actually to abbreviate “Minimalist Shooter Adventure,” and that minimalism extends to the story, which gets maybe a minute of total screen time. Basically, you and your fellow sentient ships are enjoying your lives together when an invading force comes in with guns blazing to break up the party, flinging ships to all corners of the map and encasing them in crystals. Your job, once you break free of your own gemstone prison, is to find your Shipling friends and “restore balance to the Great Crystal,” whatever that means. It’s not Shakespeare, but it sets you off on a fun adventure.

If you’ve played top-down Zelda games before, then you know exactly what to expect here: You’ll poke around the overworld, delving into caves, fighting enemies, and solving light puzzles. This is all extremely pleasant, thanks in no small part to the controls. Minishoot’ glides along so smoothly that simply moving across the screen feels satisfying.

Some areas are blocked off by obstacles like pits and water, but you can explore these regions later, once you obtain the right equipment. For instance, you unlock a surf ability that lets you glide over water, and a boost that lets you use ramps to leap over pits. These upgrades are a joy, both because the controls are so good and because they let you explore further into the map. This is a tried-and-true formula, and it works particularly great in Minishoot’ because of how frequently the upgrades are handed out during the adventure. The pacing feels just right, so I never felt like my progress had stalled.

The only major aspect that’s not inspired by Zelda is the twin-stick combat, which (if you’re using a gamepad, as is highly recommended) has you move around with the left stick while firing bullets in any direction with the right. This addition is incorporated so seamlessly into the otherwise recognizable framework that you might wonder if Link should’ve been a little ship all along.

Your starting weapon is as weak as a peashooter, but as you take down enemies and blast through gemstones scattered throughout the world, you level up, earning points you can feed into 11 different enhancements — things like fire rate, damage, range, and bullet speed. Each of these enhancements can be upgraded numerous times, making any single upgrade feel a little too incremental, which is somewhat disappointing. Worse, the cost of the upgrades increases as your enhancements become stronger. That means, for instance, you need to spend three levels’ worth of currency to gain the second damage upgrade.

Thankfully, you’re also picking up new abilities as you bolster your damage output, so I always felt like I was making progress regardless. And your attack upgrades do eventually add up; by the time I confronted the final boss, I could unleash a bullet hell barrage of my own.

Unlike Zelda, the enemy designs are largely forgettable in Minishoot’ Adventures, at least when it comes to their looks. Like the Shipling protagonists, the bad guys you’re blowing up are all mechanical constructs. Most are beige ships that come in different geometric shapes – this one’s a circle! Here’s a triangle! Lynels and moblins these are not.

On the other hand, these enemies do have a nice variety of attack styles, and they’re strategically placed around the environment to pose different kinds of challenges, making them far more interesting to fight than they are to look at. For instance, stationary turrets might snipe at you from a distance while a cluster of small enemies swarms your way, giving you plenty to consider as you try to kill the cluster while avoiding the incoming bullets. Many rooms lock you inside while spawning increasingly difficult waves of enemies. (There are even a handful of races for you to compete in, complete with a starting block and finish line.)

Bosses are also mechanically interesting, big and challenging battles divided into phases – and it’s here that this twin-stick shooter veers into bullet hell territory. You usually have to thread your way through a maze of projectiles, all while directing your own stream of bullets at the boss. It’s a blast. I died a lot in these fights, but just like in top-down Zelda games, the dungeons are designed to give you a short route back to the boss room from your respawn point, so I was always excited to try again rather than getting frustrated.

Every inch of Minishoot’ Adventures is packed with smart little details, like hidden paths hinted at by gentle indents in the walls, or how enemies gradually turn redder as they take damage so you can tell when they’re about to die. There are plenty of collectables to seek out, from red coins and heart pieces to chunks of the overworld map. As you progress, various symbols start to appear in unexplored regions to point you toward new areas of interest, so I never felt aimless or lost.

It’s all set to a charming and engrossing electronic soundtrack. The sound effects are full of little bloops and plooks and ASMR-friendly tinkles, as well. Combine that soundscape with surprisingly cute animations (an especially impressive feat for a game about faceless ships) and you get a cozy vibe, even when you’re sweating through an onslaught of bullets.

If it’s Wrestlemania season, that means it’s also time for a new WWE 2K game. Over the last few years, this series has been on its most impressive run to date, and WWE 2K26 is a solid enough next chapter in that story. I don’t regret the time I've spent running the ropes in this year’s ring, but with another milquetoast Showcase mode and the growing tendrils of monetization wrapping itself around the experience like an anaconda vise, it’s starting to feel like the golden age for 2K wrestling games might be coming to an end.

2K26 hasn’t learned many new moves since last year, mostly just tweaking existing base mechanics. The biggest slam to the system is an adjustment to stamina, adding a condition called “winded” to superstars who run out. While winded, your stamina wheel turns from yellow to purple, and you can no longer run or use reversals until it empties and goes back to normal. This adds more risk-reward to all of the offensive and defensive actions you do in the ring that cost stamina.

It also creates a solution to the 2K series issue of how powerful the reversal system is (you are basically unstoppable if you’ve become the Tribal Chief of pressing one button on time, every time) by making it cost stamina to do and penalizing you for running your stamina into the red. However, it doesn’t address the problem of how the reversal prompts are unintuitive and sometimes at unpredictable points during a move’s animation, making picking the system up feel impossible without hours of ring time and muscle memory development. It also creates a new issue that penalizes players for getting good at the janky system in the first place. To play around this, you might opt to go for pins or submissions you normally wouldn't attempt in order to wait the debuff out. That is an interesting way to make matches mimic the real life pace of TV wrestling, but does feel like a violation of the aggressive spirit of a wrestling game. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Other adjustments are nice to have but don’t change the flow or feel of matches significantly. Harkening back to the series’ pre-Visual Concepts days, collision physics have been changed slightly, so throws and bumps are less trapped in canned animation sequences and interact with objects around them. A body suplexed into the ropes will actually bounce off in a more appropriately reactive way instead of attempting to clip through them. Throw an opponent onto the ring stairs, and they’ll properly crunch around their hulking metal block. This doesn’t have any obvious mechanical advantages, you don’t do noticeably more damage to opponents if you drop them on a chair vs the mat. But it is entertaining and enhances the slapstick nature already inherent in any given match to sometimes Looney Tunes levels.

Another blast from the past are the additional match types added in 2K26: I Quit, Dumpster, Inferno, and Three Stages of Hell. That last one is essentially a gauntlet where you choose three different match stipulations and wrestle through them, two-out-of-three falls style. The Dumpster match is functionally no different than the Casket or Ambulance matches, where you have to weaken opponents enough to shove them in a box they don't want to be in. The Inferno match returns from the Smackdown vs Raw series with a more straight forward play path: Doing moves increases the temperature gauge, and once it's at max, you must expose the enemy to the flames to win. This was cool, but also isn’t that special once the new car smell has burned away.

I Quit is arguably the best of these new options, basically elaborating on the submission match, but instead of the normal mashing minigame, players that are being forced to say I Quit must pass a series of checks hitting the right spots on a gauge enough times to continue on. These spots get smaller as you take more damage, and opponents can add blockers to make the task that much harder, which they can earn the same way they earn finishers. This is a really clever idea, just complex enough to be engaging and tactical without being too much to deal with.

This year’s Showcase, themed around the highlights and lowlights of CM Punk’s two-pronged WWE career, was a disappointment. It suffers from most of the same problems that these modes always have, like the gaping holes in history that it has to ignore for corporate reasons, or the awkward ways it tries and fails to recreate major moments in real matches as gameplay moments. The former is a problem not just because of wrestler contract woes – Bryan Danielson won’t be on the playlist since he’s with a rival company these days – but also its wholesale refusal to engage at all with why CM Punk left WWE for over a decade. I'm sure it's a legal minefield and also a bit of a bummer to discuss some of those details for all parties involved, but they make no real attempt to address it at all, and it feels a little insulting to the intelligence after a while. There's also no mention of CM Punk’s most infamous/influential moment, when he went off script during the now legendary “Pipe Bomb” promo, which seems like the kind of oversight that’s punishable by going one on one with The Undertaker.

The 10+ year gap he’s had in his career is already a spectre that really haunts this mode, as it makes the pickings for memorable moments to relive slim. They try to address this with a little kayfabe, Punk engaging in a metanarrative between matches to use the “Slingshot Technology” that Showcase employs to meld matches and real footage as a sort of time machine. That allows him to both undo some losses in his own career, embody Bret Hart to prevent the Montreal Screwjob, and indulge himself in a bunch of “what if” dream matches. These make up half of the Showcase and definitely feel more like busy work than cool experiences, even though they are right in line with the toybox nature of wrestling games to begin with.

This year’s MyRise follows The Archetype, a former top star returning from a long layoff to try to get their groove back. It’s an more streamlined story overall, with fewer big beats across its six chapters but some more consequential decisions to make in each, usually to change your alignment from heroic fan favorite to callous villain (and possibly back again). The plot of The Archetype’s journey has the kinds of twists and turns you might expect from a main character on any given stretch of episodes of the TV shows, filled with overcoming impossible odds, having victory snatched from you though dastardly betrayals, and so on. The writing and voice acting throughout is consistent for the series, which is to say largely mediocre but not offensively so.

Though it’s shorter than past MyRise’s, grinding largely meaningless matches to get from plot point to plot point still feels like wasted time. The process is more transparent than last year, now instead of just doing a bunch of matches until they say you can move on, you have a goal to earn 12 stars in however many matches it takes you to do so (you can earn up to five per match). These help build your attribute points to make your superstar stronger, but no good story-based attempt is made to make these matches feel like anything other than homework. Speaking of story, the adherence to the regular WWE storytelling formula is nice but I really missed the weird and silly stuff I often associated with this mode. Last year's game featured resident wrestling jester R-Truth unlocking the secrets of traveling the multiverse. In games passed, your wrestler might have a whole side quest based around finding a cursed amulet that gave you wrestling demon powers.

These sorts of things seem relegated to The Island, the weird, Street Fighter World Tour-esque multiplayer hub world that lets players create their own wrestlers and participate in open world RPG-style quests while also competing with each other on leaderboards, which is at least a more coherent game mode out of the gate this time. It embraces and builds on the fantastical nature of last year’s version, leaning into mysterious powers of The Island of Relevancy, now being divided up by three different factions all fighting to gain its magical powers. This sort of pro wrestling RPG nonsense is something that I would be all over on paper, but the original Island’s poor writing and janky pacing put me off.

This year makes an attempt to address that. Having a better map to navigate and being fully voiced are steps in the right direction, but the stories being told are just as bad and boring. Your characters start with minimal cosmetic options and way more stats to manage than in any other mode, all because of the profit incentive inherent in this mode, which requires you to spend a lot of time grinding in-game experience to unlock options or level up while also enticing you to tap out and just buy yourself a shortcut with real money. You could ignore the cosmetics, sure, but if you want to get anywhere on the multiplayer leaderboards without spending hours grinding, I don’t see how it's possible without opening your wallet. This dawned on me pretty early, and I haven’t been back since.

Battle Passes make their debut in 2K26, and they leave a lot to be desired. There is a lot to earn split between free and premium pass tracks. Many of the free rewards are arenas, superstars, championships, and cosmetics you would have usually bought from an in-game store with free currency in previous games (or would have just been available out of the gate), while the premium track features a lot of MyFaction related goodies and a handful of extra wrestlers, with this first season themed around the stars of AAA. These replace the wrestler DLC drops of old, and I can see them being a frustrating replacement – not simply because it means you’ll need to grind matches in order to unlock things you’d just buy previously, but also because unlocking new tiers seems to take a lot of work. I spent around 25 hours between random exhibition matches, finishing Showcase mode, one full playthrough of MyRise, and a couple of hours on The Island, and I’ve only made it to tier 14 of 40. At the end of the track are unlockables, like what would have been the late Bray Wyatt’s last costume and a really cool move that I would have loved to give to a custom wrestler, but I fear I simply don’t have the endurance for that grind, or the patience to accept that I even have to.

Some of the more niche modes like Universe and MyGm are still good, with small improvements that don’t shake things up too dramatically but are certainly nice to have. You can now draft rosters against a computer controlled GM in Universe mode, and can do so really whenever you want, adding a dynamic way to shake up your rosters if things are starting to get stale. MyGM expands seasons to 50 weeks (and adds more PLEs to compensate), more match types, etc. The key change I found really spiced all this up the most was that you could book intergender matches and feuds, as well as book wrestlers in matches and promos on the same card. That means nothing to people who don’t care about this, but GM heads know that it opens up a lot of new options for promoting matches and maximizing your potential for fan and money gains from week to week. Great little shining additions to modes that are hiding away in corners.

Split keyboards have been a thing in the enthusiast space for years, but it's only recently that we've seen big name gaming brands take a stab at the idea. Case in point is the Asus ROG Falcata, an ergonomic mechanical keyboard that, when angled apart, forms a similarly curved design to the falcon-shaped Iberian sword it's named after. As well as offering a more comfortable posture for typing, the keyboard can also be used with the left half alone, making it a revival of the classic "gamepad" design: all the keys you need for FPS, and nothing more. Modern magnetic switches lie underneath each key, sound dampening ensures a lovely typing experience, and there's even low-latency 2.4GHz wireless, on top of Bluetooth and wired USB-C, providing a ton of extra flexibility.

Unfortunately, all that functionality comes at a cost. The Falcata is a wince-inducing £335 in the UK, and a similarly outrageous $420 in the US. Discounts to £300 or $350 soften the blow slightly, but we're still talking about a truly premium keyboard that needs to hit on all levels: great typing, performant gaming, significant ergonomic benefits, sensible software and impeccable design.

The ROG Falcata comes close to hitting that high-water mark, but I'm not quite sure it totally delivers. Still, it's a fascinating piece of kit to use, and does at least set a new standard for the nascent ergonomic gaming keyboard category.

Design and Features

The ROG Falcata is a 75% size keyboard of two halves, which are joined together by a short (or slightly longer) USB-C to USB-C cable. Each half has a long integrated palm rest, nearly the size of the keyboard itself, giving the whole assembly a vaguely square aspect ratio, though these are removable if you don't need or want them.

The 75% design is fairly ordinary, with Function row keys along the top, arrow keys in the lower right and a volume wheel in the upper left, though the LED lighting strip along the left side of the board which shows your volume setting and keyboard brightness levels, amongst other metrics, is unique and genuinely useful. Tiny icons illuminate to show you what you're adjusting, and light races up or down the LED strip to signify your current level.

The split space bar also makes good sense here, allowing you to jump or create a gap with either hand, and there are even switches for connectivity and rapid trigger mode tucked behind the Escape key.

The one thing here I simply cannot abide is the Copilot key in the lower right. Its placement borders the arrow keys, and I find myself hitting it constantly when I don't mean to. It's meant to be possible to disable it in software, but for whatever reason this setting doesn't work, so the unwanted Copilot window regularly appears – much to my consternation.

The magnetic switches inside the keyboard allow for some interesting features versus standard mechanical switches, but feel very similar to traditional linear switches. Asus has included four layers of sound dampening here, meaning the tone of each key press is deeper and more pleasant, and the key action is also refined: moderately weighted (49g), relatively quiet and extremely smooth. The backlit PBT keycaps are easily readable in dark environments, and of course RGB can be disabled to save battery life or if you simply prefer the look of a single colour or nothing at all.

The Falcata can be used in wired or 2.4GHz wireless mode at up to 8000Hz, or in Bluetooth mode at up to 250Hz. Battery life is rated at up to 200 hours with 2.4GHz and RGB disabled, which is typical for this category, but expect 2000Hz, 4000Hz and 8000Hz polling rates to cut this longevity to days or mere hours.

Software

The Falcata is supported by Asus' web-based Gear Link software, which allows you to remap keys, change the lighting, set up FPS features like SOCD, and change other keyboard settings. The software is considerably more polished than Cherry Xtrfy's equivalent software I looked at over at Eurogamer recently, with polished English language text, an intuitive layout, and sensible default settings.

There are even some quite rare features here, including the smart ability to swap the left Windows key for a Function key if only the left side of the keyboard is being used, or enable an 8000Hz polling rate for frequently used keys only in so-called 'Zone mode'. It's easy to set the actuation point and dead zones of the keyboard on a per-key or entire board basis, thanks to live readouts of how far each key is being pressed – a bit like Logitech has done with the similar sensors inside its revolutionary X2 Superstrike mouse.

Similarly, rapid trigger is smartly suggested for the WASD movement keys by default, while the counter-strafing aid SOCD (called 'speed tap') is on A and D, another sane choice. At every turn, it's clear that Asus has invested the time in making sure its features are well explained with little tooltips and set up to be of immediate use – a surprising rarity in some keyboard software.

Performance

The ROG Falcata is noticeably rapid in fast-paced games, as you'd hope, and I appreciate the huge amount of extra mousing space that running with just the left half of the keyboard provides. Of course, it's a bit of an annoyance when you remember a critical key is on the right side of the board – such as 'y' for chatting in Counter-Strike – but even with both halves in use, the compact 75% design works well.

The Falcata includes magnetic switches, as is the vogue for FPS-focused gaming keyboards these days, and the rapid trigger, SOCD, and adjustable actuation points are all useful tools in your toolkit for speeding up your inputs. SOCD is particularly vital for counter-strafing in tactical FPS games, but it's worth bearing in mind that it's banned in Counter-Strike 2 and is of limited usefulness outside of the shooter genre. Finally, 8K polling shaves a few microseconds off your inputs, but does have a higher CPU impact than the default 1K polling, so I wouldn't suggest enabling it unless you have a beefy computer and a particular interest in eking out fine margins to attain victory.

The usability of the keyboard outside of gaming is also strong, with the left-mounted scroll wheel proving surprisingly useful for adjusting the volume without needing to lift your hand off your mouse. The more ergonomic positioning that the split design allows isn't too tricky to adjust to – I mainly needed to train myself to press the 'b' key with my left hand instead of my right – and there are screw-in lifts in the box to allow you to angle the keyboard as you see fit. A bit of 'tenting' – having the inside of the keyboard raised slightly – is meant to be a bit more comfortable for your wrists, and this is fully possible here, though you don't get the kind of fine-grained adjustability that the posable legs of an Ergodox EZ provides, for example.

With its integrated palm rest, I found the Falcata a bit too bulky to easily tuck into a bag, especially as you need to pack a cable to connect the two halves even if you're planning to use the Bluetooth or 2.4GHz wireless connectivity options. That makes for a slightly messy setup, though there is an included shorter cable if you want only a slight gap between the two boards (or to use them fully joined up). The magnetic switches here are comfortable and relatively quiet for typing, whether you're writing an article or coding a script, though the PBT keycaps are a little slick for my liking. Still, I can't complain about the overall feeling of the board, which is suitably premium.

Will is former deputy tech editor for IGN, specialising in PC hardware, sim racing and display tech. He has been publishing about games and technology since 2001 (age 12). Will was formerly Deputy Editor at Digital Foundry. He is currently playing BattleTech Advanced Universe.

The Herman Miller x Logitech Embody is the chair that supported me through lockdown in 2020, and almost six years later it still feels nearly brand-new. That's a rarity for the gaming chairs I've used in the past, which have all shown visible signs of wear – or even genuine functional misfortune – after similar timeframes. While the design has remained the same ever after, Herman Miller and partners Logitech have produced new colorways over the years, including an eye-catching navy/purple "Nova" combo plus the white/orange "Ignite" shade that recently arrived at my doorstep.

That makes it a great time to mull over exactly why the Embody has remained my go-to option, despite testing a half-dozen other great gaming chairs in as many years – many of which come with much longer feature lists, greater adjustability and more attractive price tags.

Design

The Embody Gaming Chair is a striking chair to look at, especially in some of the wilder colorways available. Each two-tone design highlights the almost skeletal structure at the back of the chair, with segmented soft and stretchy plastic supported by thin plastic ribs that gradually link up into larger assemblies and finally join onto the aluminum frame. Underneath the seat, a denser mesh of similar construction supports your weight.

Meanwhile, arms curve up from the base of the chair, again with a more organic shape compared to the default racing-style bucket seat used by most gaming chair manufacturers. This structure gives the Embody more flexibility than those other designs; as you change position naturally, the chair stretches, supports and realigns.

The front of the chair, aka the bit that will potentially appear in Zoom meetings, is much more anonymous. Black or white polyester fabric covers the back rest and seat, with an extremely subtle color-matched Logitech logo and a few textural ridges being the only design elements of note beyond the overall gently curving shape. The top of the arm rests are made of squidgy foam, and the five-star base holds double-wheel casters of a modest (2.5-inch) size.

All told, the seat measures 29 inches wide, 41 to 52 inches high and 38 to 46 inches deep, while the total height of the chair is 42 to 45 inches. With these dimensions and a maximum weight capacity of 300 pounds, the Embody Gaming Chair is robustly constructed and should suit even the big and/or tall, including my 6'2", 190 pound frame.

Assembly and Adjustability

I normally need to spend a lot of time detailing the assembly process in chair reviews, but thankfully I don't have to do that here. That's because the Embody is shipped fully constructed, so you simply open one face of the massive cardboard cube that arrives, and the chair rolls out, ready to go. You're left with a huge amount of cardboard to cut down into small enough pieces that it'll fit into your recycling situation, or you can leave it in place if you want a king-sized box for your kids/cats/enemies to chill in. Still, versus other chairs that come packed in all manner of non-recyclable foam, polystyrene or other assorted guff, the Embody is mercifully easy to clean up after. Not having to spend an hour (or three) on assembly is also a massive plus.

Once you've lugged the chair into position, you're free to set it up, which is again quite straightforward as the Embody's feature list isn't miles long. A pull control on the front right side controls the hydraulics, letting you raise or lower the chair, while a dial in the same spot controls the tension of reclining. On the back right, you can adjust the strength of the lumbar support, with the chair moving from being straight-backed to being more s-shaped. A paddle on the left locks or unlocks the recline mechanism, and handles on either side of the front of the seat let you extend the seat depth. Finally, the arm rests have small buttons hidden underneath; pushing them in allows the arms to be raised or lowered. You can also exert a little force to pull the arm rests out wide, or move them closer to your body.

It's all very straightforward stuff, and yet there's plenty here that is unique in its execution. The arms, for example, can drop so low that you can move fully underneath most desks; normally, I'd have to completely unbolt the arms and take them off to adopt my favored forearms-on-desk typing position. Likewise, moving the arms in makes me feel more cozy in cold weather, especially if I have a hoodie on, while pushing them wider gives me more room to wriggle in warmer weather. The backrest adjustments seem better suited than most in pushing me into an upright position that's actually comfortable for hours on end, and being able to extend the seat depth is brilliant for when I've got my foot up on the desk's cross-brace.

There's also plenty that's not here compared to most gaming chairs. The arm-rests aren't "4D", so they don't move forward or backwards or rotate side to side. The back of the seat ends at my shoulders, and there's no head rest. Similarly, there's no ability to recline at nearly 180 degrees.

I miss absolutely none of these features. In fact, I'm actively glad that they haven't been included, as their omission makes the Embody a shorter, more mobile chair that's easier to push from one room to another, or fit under a standing desk in its upright position. The lack of a neck rest means that you actually need to sit upright rather than doing a full-body slouch, and no deep recline means that you must lie down on a bed or something, all of which feel like they're much better for you. Indeed, I had fairly bad back pain off and on for years before getting the Embody, and it's been much rarer since.

Still, some of this will come down to personal preference. I know some people that love to rest their arms on their chairs, and the Embody doesn't offer much adjustability here. Likewise, if you are the sort of person that likes to tilt way back and stare at the ceiling while thinking, the Embody doesn't allow for it. That doesn't make it a bad chair by any means, but as with many peripherals, it's as much a case of individual need as it is of objective measurement of quality.

Comfort and Performance

The Embody, like other adjustable gaming or office chairs, will take some time to get dialed in. While height and arm rest position is likely something you'll set once and not touch too often again, adjusting the strength of the lumbar support and how the chair reclines may require some experimentation. There are no discrete notches to signify where in a given settings' adjustment you are, and changing one setting can impact another, so you may have to keep tweaking things for a period of days or weeks before you're truly happy.

Still, what you're actually changing is at least easy to understand, and most people that have tried the Embody – including my wife and friends that have stayed with us for a few days or weeks – ended up being quite happy with overall comfort levels after spending a day or two making adjustments.

Once set up, the Embody is a stalwart companion for both working and gaming. I try to mix standing and sitting when working, and having a chair that provides a good amount of lumbar support while also fitting easily under a standing desk makes things a lot easier. Similarly, having arms that drop down low enough to let me slide under a desk and put my face really close to the screen is ideal for Counter-Strike and other games that reward being able to spot changes to just a handful of pixels.

On days where I'm being naughty and not standing up at all, the Embody is supportive and comfortable enough that I can sit down for four hours, type up a bunch of reviews, and get up without feeling in pain. It's still obviously better to take breaks, stand up, go look at nature and so on, but for days where you need to lock in for whatever reason, the Embody has been excellent.

Best of all, that comfort has persisted. I'm now nearly half-way through the chair's 12-year warranty period, and my old chair looks and feels nearly identical to one delivered just a few weeks ago. (Having said that, I really do need to vacuum some of the fluff out of the back of the seat.) That experience gives me a unique opportunity to recommend a product based on real long-term use, rather than a necessarily brief initial testing period, and do so with a real measure of confidence.

Will is former deputy tech editor for IGN, specialising in PC hardware, sim racing and display tech. He has been publishing about games and technology since 2001 (age 12). Will was formerly Deputy Editor at Digital Foundry. He is currently playing BattleTech Advanced Universe.

Undertone is in theaters on March 13.

Sound is a criminally under-respected aspect of film production, and there’s a school of thought that most audiences are more likely to be taken out of the experience of watching a movie by bad sound than bad picture. With its “haunted podcast” hook, Undertone has no shortage of respect for the aural arts and does emphasize them consistently, using sound to ratchet up the intensity and sustain a threatening mood. But with little in the way of interesting visual ideas or compelling drama to support that mood, Undertone is far more muted than its interesting central conceit provides for.

Undertone follows podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri), who’s largely homebound taking care of her comatose, dying Mama (Michelle Duquet). The auditory experience of Undertone has been billed as critical to the film, and director Ian Tuason gets Undertone off to a good start by quickly establishing Evy’s difficult circumstances in a montage that establishes not just the look of the house they share, but the sound. Tuason captures the stillness of the home, Mama’s labored breathing, hints at the happier life Evy and her Mama shared before she fell ill; they’re all reminders of how sidelined Evy has become in her own life.

That all slides away when Evy sits at her table and puts her headphones on to record The Undertone Podcast, a show in which she skeptically debates her believer co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) about paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories. Undertone’s sound mix focuses on Evy and Justin’s voices at the expense of all other background noise during their recording sessions. It’s a great technical hook for the movie that succeeds at not just demonstrating how the podcast is Evy’s escape from her dire circumstances, but providing a clean sensory stage for the auditory horror. As a device for driving dread in horror, restricting a character’s senses and channeling that into the filmmaking is a savvy move to create a base level of tension, and it’s a stylistic choice that does help Undertone maintain momentum, even through a mystery that winds up feeling like a broken record.

Evy and Justin receive an anonymous email containing 10 audio recordings from an unknown sender which document the plight of Jessa and Mike, an expectant young couple who seem to have been plagued by a supernatural entity as they prepare to welcome their baby. From there, Undertone falls into a predictable rhythm: Evy and Justin listen to more of the recordings which reveal more of the Jessa and Mike thread, something causes the two to stop the podcast taping, and Evy experiences something spooky in the time before the next session, suggesting that maybe whatever’s happening on the tapes is starting up in her own home.

Opening email attachments from unknown senders is, of course, the “reading Sumerian out of a book bound in human flesh” of 21st century horror, and that’s emblematic of where Undertone fails to consistently deliver on its premise: it’s quite old-fashioned. Secret messages in lullabies played in reverse, creepy crying babies, passages that trigger events around the person listening, elements of speech hidden in the spectrogram of the files, long stretches of silence punctuated by spikes in volume for an easy jump scare… these are tricks we’ve specifically seen/heard before in audio-forward horror like Session 9 or Pontypool and, really, across countless other horror movies too. There’s nothing inherently wrong with reaching into a well-worn trick bag to put your own spin on the classics, but Undertone’s horror seldom takes advantage of the modern trappings of podcasting to any specific degree. The recording of the Undertone Podcast episode in question winds up just functioning as a structural home base for the plot, which feels like a missed opportunity for Undertone to create more of a unique identity for itself.

Undertone’s nondescript visual sensibility further hampers those identity issues. Tuason favors languid takes with the camera drifting around the naturalistically-lit recording space, creating a sense that something terrifying is lurking just out of view. Undertone’s narrative rhythm seldom allows for that dread to pay off during the sessions though, as it’s usually after those that Evy sees hints that the entity from the tapes may be encroaching on her. So, as the movie goes, the recording sessions actually start to feel like a safer space for Evy. As for when she’s checking to see what’s going bump in the night, Evy plays out a familiar pattern of slowly walking to the source of the noise, and either finding nothing or, at most, there may be something creepy that activates in soft focus just out of her field of view. Undertone’s visual and aural approaches to horror seldom feel like they’re working in concert, and neither is consistently effective enough to make up for the shortcomings of the other. The mix of the movie’s unsettling tone and the mystery of just what’s causing the chaos on the tapes (and how that chaos is bleeding into Evy’s life) are each compelling enough to keep Undertone afloat as it goes, but don’t expect it to echo with you too long after its 94 minutes are up.

As Evy, Nina Kiri’s got a hell of a job in selling the horror of what’s on those tapes all by herself onscreen. Dramatizing the act of active listening is a tall order, but Kiri does well with matching the pitch of Evy’s reactions to what’s going on in the recordings without ever selling anything too hard. That composure carries into moments where she’s struggling with her relationship to alcohol or investigating the increasingly strange occurrences around her house, like the appearances of strange tokens or her mom somehow appearing out of bed, despite being effectively brain dead. But in the moments where Evy speaks to her unresponsive “Mama”, Kiri adopts a childlike tone that feels incongruous to the more assertive Evy we see during the podcast tapings, even if she’s not “in character” in front of the mic. The choice to infantilize Evy in that way, especially as she considers having a child of her own, feels aimed at propping up Undertone’s motherhood theme which, with Mama’s failing health and Jessa’s harrowing circumstances at front of mind, seems like it should be a far more prominent part of Undertone’s full picture than it winds up being.

Evy’s at a fascinating point in her life, debating whether to go right from being a full-time caregiver to her mom to a full-time caregiver to a child of her own, so it’s increasingly aggravating for that idea to get more and more backgrounded to the surface-level supernatural spookies that are pulling her mind in different directions. Not helping any of this is Justin, Evy’s grating London-based co-host. As the true believer, Justin’s the one more concerned with the theater of the podcast, but even when he’s not amping up the showmanship when “in character,” DiMarco is less successful than Kiri at matching his emotional tenor to what’s going on in Evy’s house. Most of Justin’s dialogue is nakedly designed to keep the plot moving or to prompt Evy to reveal a little more about how she’s feeling, but as the only other real character in the movie, especially because he’s off-camera the whole time, Justin could’ve used a lot more fleshing out for as much airtime as his voice gets.

All eight episodes of One Piece Season 2 premiere March 10 on Netflix.

Let's get something out of the way first: There is no need to worry about Tony Tony Chopper, because the beloved doctor of the Straw Hat Pirates is perfect. This was arguably the biggest challenge Netflix's live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's manga masterpiece, One Piece, faced in its second season. The talking reindeer with medical skills is one of the main characters and featured prominently in the story, but a mutant talking reindeer that transforms into different human-hybrid forms is not just an expensive work of VFX, but one that walks too fine a line between cartoony and real. Thankfully, this is not a Sonic the Hedgehog situation; instead, Chopper is the standout of the season.

Not only does the VFX work look fantastic, but the way Chopper moves, acts, and interacts with the world and other characters around him is fantastic and makes him look and feel like he is a living, breathing part of the show's world. He’s just cartoony enough that you believe the looks of shock and wonder in Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) when he first encounters this strange creature, and as voiced by Mikaela Hoover, Chopper is just the most adorable character of 2026 so far and one that will rip your heart out and tear it apart.

Chopper is not the only impressive bit of VFX wizardry in Season 2 of One Piece, which improves upon the first season and fixes its biggest issues. We are far removed from the monstrosity that was Arlong in Season 1, and instead we get a cavalcade of visually stunning creatures, characters, and locales. We meet giants, a giant whale, dinosaurs, and even an otter riding a vulture into battle — and they all look like they’ve been brought straight out of the pages of Oda's manga. Meanwhile, the costume and hair design for the more human characters finds the right balance of realism and cartoon. The world of One Piece is an incredibly cartoonish one, and Season 2 continues to thrive in that tone, balancing absurd comedy and lightheartedness with serious (and often quite bloody) action and heartbreaking drama.

With most character introductions and flashbacks out of the way, Season 2 of One Piece is all about its world. We follow Luffy and the other Straw Hats as they finally enter the Grand Line and immediately get embroiled in a conflict with the vast and nefarious criminal syndicate, Baroque Works. This season, the different towns and islands we encounter feel more developed; an early standout is Loguetown, which is filled with little details about history and culture that makes the world of One Piece feel truly lived-in.

Without more flashbacks to flesh out the core characters, One Piece risked becoming a bit stagnant this season. Though the manga and anime develop the characters over time, it can take several years for a character to go through any significant development, which wouldn't really work on TV. The season fixes this by adding material that isn't strictly in the source material, but might as well be. For instance, Zoro (Mackenyu) spends a big chunk of the season struggling with almost being killed by Mihawk last season, having visions of the Warlord of the Sea and fighting to slowly regain his self-confidence. In fact, everyone in the crew gets a moment to shine this season, which helps make every character feel important and essential.

Arguably the biggest creative choice the live-action One Piece makes is to tell the story in a more linear fashion than the manga or anime. This means featuring characters and events that aren't revealed until much later in the manga in a more chronologically correct order here. For example, the season starts with a fateful meeting between Gold Roger (Michael Dorman) and Monkey D. Garp (Vincent Regan) right before the former King of the Pirates’ execution that we only learn about a couple hundred chapters later. This might anger some fans who consider this to be spoilers, as it does technically tell you things at the wrong time when compared to the source material.

And yet, it is these moments that make the One Piece live-action show shine as an adaptation. It serves a practical purpose, of course; it’s quite unlikely that Netflix will get to cover the entirety of Oda's manga, considering the gargantuan, decades-long endeavor that would require. So for longtime fans, the show is giving them the chance to see events or characters that they might otherwise never get to see in live action, like Bartolomeo being in Loguetown and seeing the Straw Hats for the first time. Most importantly, however, it fleshes out the world of One Piece, giving the audience hints of other characters and the lives and stories that are unfolding alongside our main pirate crew. They might intersect later, but for now, it’s just a small way of making the world of One Piece feel much, much bigger than just our small band of pirates going from island to island. It also makes the experience of watching this show unique and new no matter what your level of familiarity with the source material may be.

Who knows how long One Piece can realistically run? If Season 2 is proof of anything, it's that Oda's world can be captured in live action, and TV is better for it.

Since the earliest cave paintings, human beings have used art to recreate the world around us. But while the painter’s limit is imagination, the photographer can only capture what actually exists. They can use their tools to increase exposure, change framing, or apply filters, but they cannot create something entirely new; only preserve a moment in time. It’s telling that Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is getting its moment now. A game about twin sisters haunted by the past with a camera as their only salvation, Crimson Butterfly Remake is similarly bound to its predecessor while also being charged with modernizing it. In many ways, it succeeds. I cannot deny that I enjoyed revisiting Minakami Village, but I also fear that constantly bending a knee to the modern and adding more complex mechanics has added an artificiality that is at odds with the captivating story it tells. By the time I reached the end of my 20-hour journey, I was deeply satisfied with and impressed by this remake, as well as incredibly conflicted about that feeling.

Before I continue, let me say this: I consider the original Crimson Butterfly – not Silent Hill 2, not Eternal Darkness, not pick-your-Resident-Evil, not any modern horror game – to be both the greatest and most terrifying horror game ever made. But any artist, no matter how skilled, risks tarnishing a great work by revisiting it. This is especially true in video games, where remakes seek to supplant and replace the original, trading increased visual fidelity and “modern” (read: Better. Always better. No one has ever used this term when speaking about a game and meant “worse”) design tropes for a piece of the original’s soul. We’ve seen this story countless times, from a Mass Effect remaster that dilutes the impact of Sovereign’s arrival on Eden Prime to a remake of Demon’s Souls that is visually remarkable but butchers the atmosphere of the original. I would like to tell you that Crimson Butterfly Remake does not fall prey to these traps, that it skirts them effortlessly. But I can’t – though that doesn’t mean what’s here isn’t an admirable attempt.

Crimson Butterfly Remake follows the same setup as the original. Twin sisters Mio and Mayu are visiting a stream where they used to play as children because the entire area will soon be flooded by the construction of a dam. As they reminisce, Mayu catches sight of a crimson butterfly that draws her deeper into the forest. Mio pursues, quickly gets lost, and the two eventually reunite on a hill overlooking a lost village said to have disappeared during a festival. The path they took is gone. There is no way back. With no other options, they descend into a village where the ghosts of the past still linger. Mio and Mayu’s only defense is a strange camera – the Camera Obscura – that seems to be able to exorcise them. Their goal is simple: escape. But that will mean learning Minakami Village’s secrets, and why they were called here to begin with.

I don’t want to say more because Crimson Butterfly’s story is remarkable, and developer Team Ninja has done an excellent job of expanding it. As you venture deeper into the village, you learn about the dark nature of the festival and the unique role twins, often twin girls, played in it. Crimson Butterfly is, to its credit, a quiet game. Cutscenes are fairly rare and Mio does not incessantly chatter about what’s happening to her or about the items she picks up. Instead, you’ll learn about the story through diaries, watching ghosts follow the paths they traveled in life, and by listening to their voices, preserved in the stones their spirits left behind. You’ll learn about the people who lived here, what happened during that festival, and the fates that befell those who, like Mio and Mayu, were called to Minakami Village. Most of the expansion comes in the form of new locations and side stories that trace the paths of supporting characters, and it’s all integrated seamlessly. If I didn’t know these things weren't in the original, I would not have guessed, and they add a great deal to Crimson Butterfly’s story.

Minakami Village itself is a marvel of design, dripping with atmosphere. It’s a small place with few roads and fewer houses. But it’s dense, and it changes. You’ll revisit these roads, these houses, and each time, the experience will be different. When I first entered Osaka House, I was afraid and wary; later, it was like seeing an old friend. I became intimately familiar with those rooms, but I could never let my guard down while walking them. Kurosawa House, on the other hand, was terrifying no matter how many times I walked its sprawling halls. Whenever I passed through its doors, I felt myself tense up.

What I admire most about Crimson Butterfly Remake is how little it holds your hand. While there are objective markers to guide you around the village between story beats and crimson butterflies sometimes light the way forward, once you enter a house, all bets are off. If you need to go to a room with an altar, for instance, it is up to you to find that room. If you’re following a specter, you must use the camera to trace their path. If you are completing a side story, it is up to you to read the diary left behind and figure out where to go next. Crimson Butterfly Remake will give you the clues you need, but you’ll still have to make the journey yourself.

The Fatal Frame series is terrifying, but its horror is subtle – less an exercise in jump scares, and more one in unrelenting tension. When you pick up an item, Mio will crouch and extend her hand slowly. Oftentimes, nothing will happen. But sometimes, a ghost will appear and grab you. Each time she slides open a door, an angry spirit might be on the other side. Walk down a road, and you might stumble across a ghost or run into a roving patrol searching for twins who escaped on the night of the ritual. Sometimes, the spirits will be there, visible. Sometimes, they will simply appear.

Combat in Crimson Butterfly Remake isn’t rare, per se, but it’s also not frequent. You’ll spend much of your time exploring the village, navigating houses, snapping photos of lingering spirits and twin dolls scattered throughout the village, and solving puzzles. But every time you open a door or reach for an item, you are vulnerable. You may pull your hand away or slam a door shut in time, but they will still be there, and it won’t ease how you feel the next time. Often, those spirits are specters, condemned to retrace the paths they walked in life, only visible long enough to snap a picture if you’re quick and ready. (Change film, and you might miss them.) But sometimes, they are hostile. In the village, you can often avoid ghosts by crouching, hiding, or simply running away, which is useful against groups or when you’re not looking for a fight. But when you’re locked in a house and the doors are sealed shut, you’ll have to defend yourself with the Camera Obscura.

Your camera can exorcise ghosts. The better the picture, the more damage the shot will do. A shot that is in focus and captures a spirit’s face will be far more effective than one that captures its back. But the most effective shots are Fatal Frames, which require you to wait until a spirit attacks and the light atop the Camera Obscure flashes red. Time it right, and you’ll stagger the wraith, deal heavy damage, and replenish Mio’s Willpower, a new addition that allows her to use Special Shots (some stun, some slow, and so on) and is lost when Mio runs or a ghost strikes her. Lose all of it and Mio will be knocked to the ground and vulnerable. If a ghost attacks you while you’re down, you’ll have to use the camera to get it off. Miss your shot, and you’ll take a large amount of damage. I’m mixed on Willpower as a concept – I didn’t use Special Shots often, instead saving Willpower for when I needed to sprint – but I did appreciate it as an additional obstacle to navigate during combat.

Then there are Shutter Chances, which occur when a wraith’s health is depleted past a certain point. Snap a picture during one, and a ghost will be left defenseless for a single, high damage shot. Time a Fatal Frame with a Shutter Chance, and you’ll enter Fatal Time, allowing you to take multiple shots at once. Better pictures also reward you with points that can be spent on items and charms at save points, so there’s an additional reason to aim well.

It’s a lot to remember, but when it clicks, Crimson Butterfly’s combat is compelling. Often, you’ll only fight one wraith at a time, but even that is challenging. Success is a matter of sidestepping attacks, managing your health and Willpower, and waiting for a ghost to attack so Mio can capture that elusive Fatal Frame. Choosing the right film matters, too. Will you stick with the infinite but weak and slow-to-reload Type-07 or upgrade to the slightly stronger but still slow and limited Type-14? The Type-61 is powerful, but reloading film still takes a while and you can’t carry much of it, while the rarer Type-90 is fast, powerful, and can be carried in bulk. And then there is the incredibly slow, but powerful, Type-00, which deals massive damage even to the most frightening wraiths. There just isn’t much of it. Crimson Butterfly Remake’s combat is about timing and choice, and unlike most horror games, requires you to leave yourself open and literally face your fears to succeed. You are always vulnerable; Mio always has reason to be afraid.

Each ghost presents its own challenges. You might be tempted to use Type-07 film for more standard spirits, but others will quickly push you into loading more precious film into your camera, and each time you miss a shot with a more valuable film, it hurts. You will never forget the first time you encounter the woman in the box, nor the first time you’re locked in a room fighting two ghosts at once. My favorite encounter was against a drowned woman on a bridge who moved through the air like she was floating in water, and who seemed to transport Mio underwater as the fight progressed. Even though you’ll fight most ghosts multiple times, they never get old. Even protecting Mayu from ghosts, something you’ll have to do off and on as the sisters are separated and reunited over the course of the story, is less frustrating and simply an additional challenge.

It’s here that I must talk about Crimson Butterfly Remake’s status as a remake. In many ways, it is an unqualified success. It is visually stunning while capturing and thoughtfully updating the character designs, environments, art, and sound of the 2003 original, and there are images here that will stay with me forever. The change from fixed camera angles to the over-the-shoulder view popularized by Resident Evil 4 is admittedly mixed; it dilutes some of the horror and unease, but it means Crimson Butterfly plays better and is more responsive than any other Fatal Frame. The additions Team Ninja made to the village and the new side stories are wonderful. Even smaller choices, like the ability to hold Mayu’s hand and guide her through the village, which restores both Willpower and both sisters’ health at the expense of slower movement, is a thoughtful change that emphasizes their bond through gameplay. I also appreciate that Crimson Butterfly Remake doesn’t force you to fight everything. Sometimes, sneaking past or running away is the best (or only) option.

What bothers me are the additions to the Camera Obscura. You can equip charms to boost your damage, reduce the health or Willpower you lose when a wraith hits you, and so on. That’s fine. Finding prayer beads in the village enables you to increase how quickly the camera focuses, to focus it or zoom in and out manually, and so on, which were not options before or were unlocked after completing the original game. These are good changes. I largely relied on the automatic focus so I could concentrate on keeping wraiths in frame as I moved around, but made liberal use of the zoom feature.

Where Crimson Butterfly Remake fails is in the addition of filters that you can switch between, each of which comes with its own Special Shot ability, many of which recall the original’s various lenses. The Standard filter is an all-arounder that recovers more willpower with each snap and a Special Shot that can stun; the Paraceptual Filter allows you to see ghosts through walls, has additional range, and it’s Special Shot blinds; the Exposure filter is great for dealing with aggravated wraiths, and the Radiant filter is short ranged but deals absolutely massive damage. Each has additional uses outside of combat: the Paraceptual filter allows you to track traces of spirits, the Exposure filter can reveal hidden areas and ghosts, and the Radiant filter can open doors and objects sealed by blood. In combat, however, they become one note.

Part of this is because of the aggravated wraiths. Each time you snap a picture of a wraith, you risk aggravating it. Basically, they turn red, recover health, take much less damage, attack more frequently, and hit harder. Initially, this is incredibly frustrating, especially if you’ve been using higher quality film or if you’re fighting multiple ghosts at once in a small room. The Exposure filter is great for dealing with aggravated wraiths, though you only get it after you’ve started seeing wraiths get real mad, and you’ll have to spend high quality film to return them to normal via a Shutter Chance (which also automatically triggers Fatal Time). The issue isn’t that there isn’t an answer, it’s that there’s only one answer, at least for a while: Exposure filter and good film. It becomes a grating game of Simon Says, and I often used better film against weaker ghosts to try to end their afterlife before they became aggravated, which works great until it doesn't.

This problem carries over to the other filters, with options like the Paraceptual filter becoming my go-to for all far away ghosts. But the Radiant filter is what really breaks Crimson Butterfly Remake, especially if you upgrade the charms that boost it. Yes, the shorter range means it’s harder to hit things, but if you upgrade it, you’ll do so much damage (especially if you’re using anything other than Type-07 film) that it trivializes everything, even aggravated wraiths and boss fights. By the end, I wasn’t locked in rooms with the ghosts of Minakami Village: They were locked in rooms with me. Well, me, my fully upgraded Radiant filter, and my fully upgraded Radiant filter charm. Combine that with any decent film and they had no chance.

Yes, blasting through ghosts that I previously feared was a thrill, even if I wasn’t taking Pulitzer-worthy shots to do it (though I was still rewarded for quality), and I was never truly unafraid because Mio was still vulnerable. But as I traipsed around the village gathering prayer beads, upgrading my camera, photographing twin dolls, and checking off side stories, I realized how “gamey” some of these new additions were. I was supposed to be figuring out how to escape a haunted village, and while I could argue that completing the side stories gave me a better understanding of what happened here, what I was hoping to accomplish, and what I was up against, the rest felt… artificial. Pick up this film so I always have enough. Photograph those dolls because they're there and doing so unlocks more things at the save point. Grab that prayer bead to get a step closer to another upgrade. Pieces of candy scattered along the ground, and I acquired them because this is a video game and that’s what you do, whether they are out of place or not. Does the removal of the fixed camera angles really help, or does it just ease a little friction? Is it a good design choice, or simply the modern one that will make me more comfortable? Removing film grain makes an image clearer, but it removes detail, too.

Once you start seeing these things, you can’t stop. Case in point: the filters. An inventor making a camera that exorcises ghosts is cool and makes sense in the context of Crimson Butterfly’s story. Filters that do more damage to ghosts, or let you see through walls, or open doors sealed by bloody handprints, on the other hand, only exist to solve gameplay problems. They feel less appropriate for Crimson Butterfly’s world and undermine its otherwise very effective horrors. I went from saying things like “man, I hope there’s not a ghost in that well” to “Get out here, lady. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. I have a Radiant filter and enough Type-90 film to make you wish you’d stayed down there.”

That’s fun as a video game power fantasy, as a way to make my dopamine-seeking lizard brain go brrrr. It’s stuff that would make a lot of sense in Resident Evil, but it goes against what Fatal Frame is. The strength of Crimson Butterfly is that Mio and Mayu are ordinary girls thrust into a terrifying, supernatural situation. As powerful as the Camera Obscura is, Mio is always vulnerable while using it. She always has to look the things that haunt her in the eye, to open herself to harm and not blink. It makes sense that she is afraid when she enters the Kurosawa House and her flashlight fails, or for her to hide from large numbers of ghosts, and Crimson Butterfly is most effective when you share her fear.

Mio’s not a grizzled combat veteran or a superhero masquerading as a civilian the way most video game characters are. She’s a young woman trapped in a haunted village; she’s trying to survive and protect her sister, and she’s scared out of her mind. Her weapon is a camera, not a gun. She cannot physically overpower what threatens her. These are things she can barely comprehend, much less fight. But she continues in spite of that. She keeps raising that camera, facing her fears, and that’s what makes her brave. In creating a more seamless version of Crimson Butterfly that offers plentiful combat options, and allows you to be more powerful as a result, Team Ninja has unintentionally diluted it thematically.

It’s one of my only significant complaints about a remake that otherwise both respects and enhances the art it’s attempting to recreate, a smudge on an otherwise immaculately restored photograph, and something that I have been grappling with the impact of as I’ve thought about this review. I don’t think that this disharmony between thematic intent and modern convenience ruins Crimson Butterfly Remake, or even deeply damages it, and I doubt most people will even care. But it does make Crimson Butterfly feel more like an action game that you can optimize much of the horror out of if you wish to, and I think that does diminish it somewhat as a result.

Full spoilers follow for Primal Season 3, Episode 9, “The Hollow Crown,” which is available on Adult Swim and HBO Max now.

As we enter the final stretch of Primal Season 3, the one thing that many fans have been hoping and praying for ever since the end of Season 2 seems to be maybe, just maybe, finally happening: Zombie Spear is now more or less resurrected as good old living Spear. When we got an episode literally called “The River of Life” last week, I guess I should’ve realized that Spear would in fact return to his human form. But of course, this being the world of Primal, the question still remains: Will Spear be allowed to have the happy ending that he so dearly deserves?

This week's episode, “The Hollow Crown,” continues to show what has become the almost mechanical combat that Spear has mastered in the volcanic pit. With each victory over some hulking, bizarre combatant, our hero is crowned once again by the increasingly disapproving elder who oversees the matches, and allowed to slurp down another cup of the mysterious fluid from the previously mentioned life-giving river. The thing is, zombie Spear was endowed with an immortality – or whatever you call a zombie that can't be hurt – that living Spear does not have (as made clear when he was injured during one of this episode's fights). If Spear is fully returned to life, can he really continue to keep defeating foe after foe if he is no longer just a hunk of dead flesh?

As for that disapproving elder (or priest or whatever he is), he doesn't like that Spear has become more and more fixated on his former life and family. The elder tries to introduce a volcanic woman to Spear as a way to satiate some base need, but that's not what it's about for Spear at all and he makes his displeasure at the mere suggestion of this known, roaring in the elder's face and then hopping on his pterosaur to fly off and surreptitiously visit those who he misses.

But Mira, Fang, Fang's pups, and Spear’s child with Mira are nowhere to be found when he gets to Mira's village. That's because they’ve gone looking for him, with Mira having realized at the end of last week's episode that Spear wasn't as lost as she thought he had been. This leads to some minor adventures for the group, including a rough bout against a black panther type creature, as they follow Mira's map in search of Spear.

Mira and Spear's baby is already a character unto herself, and she brings a lot of levity to the episode, just as Fang's offspring have been doing all season. We also see here the natural bond that’s forming among the three young ones, even if Blue and Red Jr. are jealous amongst themselves for the affections of the child. But clearly, this group makes for a great traveling party – a fierce warrior, an equally fierce T. rex, and their hilarious, but not to be trifled with babies. Sure, we haven't seen Spear and Mira's daughter actually fight yet, and she is still in diapers after all, but I'm sure that she's going to be as prodigious with a blade as dear old dad ever was.

I've said it before, but we have to wonder if we're headed for a happy ending or not this season. One can’t help but look back at that final shot from Season 2, when we thought Spear was dead and gone for good. There was Mira, Fang, Mira and Spear's daughter, and Fang's two pups (all grown up)... and not a sign of Spear anywhere.

Of course, that was happening at least a few years in the future from this episode, since Spear's daughter and the two dinosaur pups are older in that scene. So perhaps we will get a happy ending next week, and Spear will stick with the family for more adventures for the time being… but I don't know. This is Primal and if nothing else, Genndy Tartakovsky has shown us time and again how harsh this world can be.

Questions and Notes From Anachronistic History

• Let’s not forget, Fang and Spear still need to reconcile too. Perhaps now that Spear has returned to his human form, Fang will finally recognize her old friend for who he is, but it’s kind of surprising that we never did get that big face-off between the two that the trailers seemed to be teasing this season.
• Spear just really getting down and dirty to work on his art is something to behold. Gotta love it.
• How great is it that Spear now has a second dinosaur companion in the pterosaur? I wonder if they’ll become friends the way he did with Fang?
• Spear’s arm’s growing back too, right? That’s the final piece of the “he’s human again” puzzle?
• How badass is Spear that he can be daydreaming about his daughter during gladiatorial combat and still win?

It’s hard to even know where to start with an RPG as deep as Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection. I reviewed both Monster Hunter Stories in 2017 and Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin in 2021 and, maybe unsurprisingly, so much of what I said about the first two carry over into my thoughts on the third. Monster Hunter Stories 3 has so much to do, all of it is rewarding, and I adored the every one of the 75 hours I happily sunk into it. Smart changes have also made it easier than ever to dig into all its different systems without watering them down in the process, making for a beautiful package that feels like a logical evolution of an already great series.

Twisted Reflection is another turn-based monster collecting RPG spin off of the long-standing, beloved (to me, for the last 22 years and counting) Monster Hunter series. Rather than only hunting monsters to turn their parts into cool outfits and weapons, here you’ll hunt them with other monsters by your side called Monsties (monsters who are your besties, of course). Like Pokemon, you can have up to six Monsties in your party and switch between them in battle, but unlike Pokemon, you fight alongside them using the weapons and armor that are iconic to the Monster Hunter series. Twisted Reflection hasn’t innovated on this particular formula much, but it’s a fun enough one that it really didn’t need to.

The most immediate changes are to your main character. First, you play as an adult rather than a child this time, which shifts the overall tone towards being somewhat more mature. Second, the protagonist has their own personality and dialogue – that’s right, for the first time in the series, your Felyne side-kick isn’t doing the talking for you. I know the Stories series is generally geared towards a younger audience, but Navirou’s over-the-top comedic puns and one-liners fit for a children’s show were always just a little too much in the first two games. Your new Palico, Rudy, is much more sensible and helpful, and he’s still humorous without acting like an over-the-top cartoon mascot. (Sorry Navirou.)

Your hero isn’t just some nobody, either. They’re a full-fledged ace Rider and captain of the Rangers – basically an environmentalist group that focuses on research and protecting the ecosystems in the kingdom of Azuria. This premise works so well with the actual gameplay mechanics, which have you taking out Invasive Species and reintroducing Endangered Species to the ecosystem. Oh, and you are also the princess/prince of your kingdom.

As someone who is already expert in their field, your character wouldn’t need someone to show them the ropes. But what about you as a new player? To get around this dilemma, Twisted Reflection handles its tutorial cleverly by making you the one who is teaching a newbie to the rangers, Thea, which is done seamlessly, painlessly, and quickly - though I do question if it’s enough for completely new players. It doesn’t waste much time before getting you to the real action, too – if you don’t get too distracted when the first map opens up for you to explore, of course, which happens very quickly. (At least unlock the Rite of Channeling before going off script, that’s my advice.)

All of these differences were so welcome and refreshing. Though the previous Stories games absolutely touched on emotional topics, the tone feels like it has shifted from a goofy Saturday morning cartoon to one more like Avatar: The Last Airbender. That said, the story itself isn’t as profound as that comparison. It tells another slight twist on what I’ve come to expect from Monster Hunter: Something bad (this time, the Crystal Encroachment) is causing monsters to run amok, you must face the affected monsters (this time, Feral Monsters) and save the region from whatever is causing it. There’s at least a more apparent impact on regular people and some bigger-picture political turmoil that’s interesting, but I wish Twisted Reflection had spent a bit more time fleshing that part out.

And while it’s not groundbreaking, I still enjoyed the story. There are moments here and there that caught me by surprise, made me tear up, and even rewarded me for being a long-time fan with references and cameos from the predecessors without shoving them in my face. I won’t spoil anything, but some of those even had me shouting enthusiastically as I played.

Exploring the Vast World

Another benefit of being an ace Rider from the very beginning is that you start with a fully-grown Rathalos as your partner, which means you immediately have the ability to fly around Twisted Reflection’s semi-open world. “Flying” is more like “gliding,” but it works well thanks to a generous number of updrafts around the map and certain high places you can fast travel to whenever you want.

Riding your Monsties around is just plain fun in general, and switching between them while riding is completely seamless. Each monster can have multiple Riding Actions, too, including the aforementioned Flying and things like Swimming or Climbing. There are also less movement-oriented options like Roaring, which stuns monsters in the overworld so you can ride right by them, and Breath Attacks, which can knock monsters over or out of the air! Having multiple Riding Actions per monster made it much easier to put together a team so I could explore fully, even early on. It’s a big improvement over Stories 2, where I felt pigeonholed into picking monsters based primarily on Riding Actions.

Variable Battles, Fluid Tactics

The battle system in Twisted Reflection is much more intricate than a lot of other turn-based RPGs I’ve played. Monsters have three attack types – Power, Speed, and Technical – that work like rock-paper-scissors, plus elemental weaknesses and resistances on top of that. Your Rider then also has three weapon damage types across six weapons to choose from, all of which have different mechanics. Monster parts can be targeted individually and are weak to specific weapon damage types, and you can switch freely between three weapons in battle in order to best exploit those weaknesses. It sounds like a lot, but the variety I knew I’d encounter encouraged me to always have a spread of upgraded weapons on hand, which kept battles fresh throughout.

This is all very similar to Stories 2’s battle system, but it’s been expanded upon. For example, you just about always have a whole crew of allies and their Monsties to choose from when deciding who will accompany you, each of whom has different strategies and items at their disposal. Your Kinship Gauge is now separate from your Stamina, so you can use skills without taking away from your “ultimate attack”– an amazing change, especially as someone who likes to rock the stamina-eating Hunting Horn. Enemy monsters now also have a Wyvernsoul Gauge – weapons and attacks have different damage values for Wyvernsoul, and depleting it will stun and then stagger the opponent, essentially skipping their turn. That smartly adds another layer of strategy beyond just choosing the best part to attack with the best weapon for the job, as sometimes targeting Wyvernsoul instead is the strategy that ensures your party will survive.

It’s a lot to think about, but it means the battles don’t ever become a simple race to spam your basic attacks. Though they take a while to get through, fights rarely felt too long for me, especially since you can double the battle animation speed. And just when battles began to feel like a little bit of a chore, I was able to start one-shotting weaker monsters in the overworld, which still granted materials and experience points without having to play through an overly easy fight. The fact that I never felt like I needed to grind for the sake of grinding helped a lot in keeping me from getting tired of combat. Instead, doing missions, tackling some optional tasks, and following my natural curiosity to fight every new monster at least once kept me leveled appropriately.

The Perfect Ouroboros

Twisted Reflection’s story and exploration are the driving forces that introduce mechanics and locations to you, but the loop of den diving, hunting, and upgrading is where it really shines. The various systems are all interconnected perfectly to create an ouroboros of a gameplay loop that feeds into itself, with micro-dopamine hits every single step of the way. I spent nearly 20 hours in the first area alone because I wanted to do everything I could before moving on, and just about everything I was really into was technically optional. But maybe that’s why it was so easy to get engrossed – nothing was spoon-fed to me or forced down my throat. Instead it simply introduced me to how things worked and then said, “Go forth.” And go forth I did.

If you don’t know Monster Hunter Stories, it works a bit differently than most traditional creature collectors. Instead of finding a monster in the overworld or in a random encounter, and then having to catch it or make it drop something, you instead search inside dens for eggs. There are multiple layers of “gacha” in this Stories system, with den spawns, eggs inside those dens, and the skills Monsties hatch all being somewhat randomized, but it all works incredibly well rather than feeling obnoxious.

Each microclimate across the large, open maps is inhabited by specific monsters, which are the species you can then find inside the eggs there. There are three rarity levels of dens to find in the overworld, which lead to three rarity levels of eggs. The eggs you “pull” from the nests inside the dens have patterns to identify the species, but hatching them into Monsties is the only way to learn what genes they have, which determine their active and passive skills. The rarer the egg, the better the three-by-three gene board that Monstie will be born with is.

Tally that all up and you have four different moments of randomized excitement. It’s an incredibly well-implemented variable reward system, which is a concept fittingly used in actual animal training as well (and to keep people doomscrolling on certain social media apps. Oops.) It might sound like that much randomization would be annoying – what if you only want one specific Monstie? But in my experience, I never had to spend very long to find what I was looking for, and the other things I picked up along the way made it feel like I never wasted my time.

Importantly, you’re getting much more than just those hits of excitement out of this cycle, too, even if some are only tangentially related. For example, it’s satisfying to pick up materials while exploring on the way to a den, which both grant my party experience points and can be used for crafting. I’m also likely casually hunting some monsters as I go, which will drop materials for weapons and armor. And if I defeat a new monster, that’s new equipment to look forward to!

Once you hatch an egg, you’re not only getting a Monstie for your collection or party, you’re also unlocking its gene skills for every Monstie you have. Genes can be freely moved between Monsties and rearranged as many times as you like using the Rite of Channeling at any camp. The ability to rearrange is important because if you match three of the same color or type of genes on the board, you’ll trigger a “bingo” bonus that buffs your Monstie in different ways. This process is a big change from Stories 2, which would consume your host monster upon transferring a single gene. You also couldn’t rearrange genes – with so many layers of commitment, and as someone who’s chronically indecisive, that system was practically torture. Twisted Reflection instead welcomes you to experiment as much as you want.

Those old gene restrictions would have also been at odds with the new system of Habitat Restoration, which has you reintroducing extra Monsties to the wild. First you must dispose of a Feral Monster in the area so you can set up a camp there, which are both relatively challenging and quite rewarding to beat. Each camp you unlock also increases the stat bonus a Monstie gets when it’s hatched from an egg from that map. And once camp is set up, you can release monsters back into that specific area – the more of a species you release there, the higher their ecosystem rank will rise, up to S-Rank.

To add even more complexity to your team building, S-Rank Monsties hatch with all three of a given map’s Environment Skills, which are especially advantageous as they don’t take up space on the gene board. Alternatively, you can send existing Monsties on an “Excursion” to different locations and they’ll come back with that region’s Environment Skills if its species is S-rank there, not to mention it will swap to that region’s stat increases regardless of its rank. That even applies to Ratha, the Rathalos permanently stuck in your party, who can gain the S-Rank environment boons even if there are no Rathalos to be found in a certain location. Hatching high rank monsties is also the only way to gain access to some powerful genes, noted as Egg Skills – yet another welcome carrot that encouraged me to engage with the Habitat Restoration system.

I became pretty obsessed with getting Monsties up to S-Rank both for the above mentioned boons, and also because a Monstie at at least A-Rank gets an additional element dictated by the area--changing its color. This system was scrapped in Stories 2, and I’m so happy it’s made its way back to the series. It’s like being able to create your own personal shiny Pokemon. This method to change a Monstie’s color is also much less convoluted than it was in the original Monster Hunter Stories, and is seemingly more advantageous as it keeps both the original and new element. I love this idea even more when I think about just how different everyone’s teams will be. I find it so common for people to end up with such similar parties in RPGs based on strength alone, but this system encourages more experimentation.

But wait, there’s more! A handful of Invasive Species have posted up in what were once Endangered Species nests tucked away in semi-hidden locations. If you repel them, you can get your hands on an Endangered Species Egg, reintroduce it to a habitat of your choice, and then meet certain requirements to get one or two more mutated species out of it.

Repelling an Invasive Species is easier said than done, though. The setup requires you to sneak around its territory to collect clues that might help you figure out how to make it run. The tutorial Invasive Yian Garuga needed me to topple it by breaking its legs, for example, to make it retreat. That’s probably the simplest of the Invasive Species mechanics. They’re all a different puzzle to solve, requiring you to figure out and execute a solution before the Invasive Species can one-shot your whole crew enough times to wipe you out.

I loved both searching for these hard-to-find monsters and challenging them, but I must admit I had to resort to taking screenshots of the tips as I found them. To my knowledge, there’s nowhere to check these clues after you pick them up for the first time. I also made the mistake of fighting these battles at 2x speed at times, causing me to miss important cues, like how the color around an Invasive Seregios temporarily changes when its roaring. Luckily, failing gifts you with a hint, but these weren’t nearly as detailed as the clues found in the den or your companions’ commentary.

The “Endgame”

After repelling an Invasive Species, you can try to actually slay it inside the Endangered Species den, but that’s very clearly meant to be an endgame activity – that’s made apparent by the fact that they’re level 50 when repelling them and level 75 when trying to slay them. The Calamitous Elder Dragons – at least the Namielle in Azuria – are also level 75. I was only level 65 when I completed the story, so that should give you a sense of how challenging these are meant to be. It’s also neat that they show up so early on. The Invasive Species arrive whenever you happen to find them, which can be as soon as you enter a new map, and the Elder Dragons have a random chance to spawn after battling at night.

Like during the rest of Twisted Reflection, none of my time felt wasted even if I spent 15 minutes getting absolutely bodied by an Elder Dragon. If I did well enough, I could repel it, meaning the next time it’ll come around pre-weakened. And even if I didn’t leave a scratch on it, those fights still rewarded me with a single Elder Dragon material. You only need three of these to make the first level of an Elder Dragon’s armor or weapon! That’s a very nice boon to rock in the early and mid game, and it’s cool to have these challenges motivating you to get stronger. And when I finally did slay an Elder Dragon, I felt truly accomplished – just like in regular Monster Hunter. It even makes it so Monsties hatched in the slayed Elder Dragon’s region get a stat increase!

However, these late-game monsters – and, of course, completing the Monsterpedia by hatching and mutating all of those endangered species – are the only endgame to speak of. I was a bit disappointed that nothing changes at all after the credits roll. While the previous Monster Hunter Stories had PvP, and even multiplayer dungeons in Stories 2, there’s nothing like that in Twisted Reflection. At least, not yet – I’m assuming (hoping) we’ll get a free title update at some point. But even if there isn’t, it still took me a good 65 hours to finish Twisted Reflection’s story, and I’ve spent 10 more hours so far happily finishing up side content after that – and I’ve enjoyed it that entire time, though I have one final Elder Dragon still waiting to be slain, a handful of Invasive Species to put to rest, and more than half the side quests left.

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 9, “300th Night,” which is available on Paramount Plus now.

I can’t believe the semester’s already over!

But that’s the problem with these 10-episode seasons in the streaming age, I guess. Whereas back in the old days, you’d get 26 episodes per season – which was probably too many, as there’d wind up being a fair amount of filler each year – 10 episodes, in the case of Starfleet Academy anyway, is proving to be just enough to scratch the surface but leave some plot and character elements a bit undercooked.

Sure, this is the penultimate episode of Season 1, so maybe everything will be fully fleshed out by the finale, but somehow I doubt it. And yes, I know I was recently complaining about episodes being too long these days, but that’s the trick – making a compelling episode of TV that works as an episode of TV is not the same as servicing your characters and story over the course of an entire season. As we get closer to the end of Starfleet Academy Season 1, I’m increasingly worried that we’re running out of runway.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy “300th Night,” which sees the return of Trek legend Jonathan Frakes to the director’s chair. The episode, which essentially functions as the first part of a two-part season finale, returns to the overarching plot of Sandro Rosta’s Caleb and the search for his mother, Tatiana Maslany’s Anisha, who were separated 16 years ago in part because of the actions of Holly Hunter’s Captain Ake.

“Where did you go?” Maslany asks her son over and over when they are finally reunited this week, in a performance that is quite effective, and doubly so when one considers that the actress and Rosta haven’t actually appeared onscreen together prior to this point (a child actor played Caleb in the pilot). Frakes shoots their reunion in tight close-ups which are fairly remarkable in their, and the actors’, ability to sell the emotion of the moment, especially considering that both characters’ faces are also covered for part of the scene.

But the mother-son reunion also means that Caleb’s whole reason for joining the Academy has now been fulfilled, which leads to another strong scene when he is compelled to go after his buddies in a series of takedowns that is clearly designed to put distance between them rather than allow Caleb to face down the reality of what he is doing – abandoning not just his friends, but also the life he had finally begun to build for himself. When Kerrice Brooks’ Sam calls bullshit on what Caleb is doing, hugging him tightly, it’s as if she’s trying with all her might to stop him from leaving. Bella Shepard’s Genesis is less forgiving, however, telling Caleb that while most guys his age are trying to make a life for themselves, he can’t because he’s “so committed to being a messed up little kid forever.”

The performances from this cast continue to do so much heavy lifting for Starfleet Academy, and the chemistry between them all doesn’t hurt either. In particular, Caleb and Zoë Steiner’s Tarima are pretty great together, as “300th Night” reminds us both in their turbolift scene as well as when Caleb visits her to say goodbye forever, even if she doesn’t realize it... “Your name sounds like music.”

By episode’s end, Anisha has been wounded while helping the cadets escape execution, and everyone is beamed up to the USS Athena, but I can’t help but wonder where things will go in the finale in terms of Anisha and Caleb. It seems unlikely that their reunion will be this neatly resolved, so the question then is, is she actually working for the Venari Ral, as Caleb asked her in this episode? Is she under the thrall of Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka? One week left and there’s still a lot to resolve here…

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• “We lack a lot of enzymes!”
• Why hasn’t Caleb tried his and his mom’s secret codeword to find her comm signals since she broke out of prison? Other than “we have to hold off until the season finale”?
• Admiral Vance grew his beard out? Looks good!
• The Omega-47 mines, we’re told, are a synthetic variant of the Omega molecule… which was first introduced on Star Trek: Voyager.
• I know Reno has an automated bridge controls set-up going, but the Athena has a non-cadet crew, right? At least on the bridge it does, so why isn’t that crew also going along for the ride to Ukeck?
• How does Sam’s tech work? I know we’re 800 years past the era of Voyager, but The Doctor needed his mobile emitter (which came from the 29th century) on that show in order to gallivant around. And yet here’s Sam just showing up wherever she wants to on this non-Federation planet.
• Speaking of which, The Doctor’s years (last episode!) raising Sam 2.0 have clearly changed him, as we see how worried he is about her now.
• I’d previously meant to mention the Kelpien cadet who we’ve seen in the background here or there. Saru’s people really have come quite a ways from the days of them being a prey species.
• Jay-Den’s Klingon ritual which he invites his friends to join him in here is the R’uustai, aka the bonding ritual from the TNG episode “The Bonding.”

IGN’s only been around for 30 years, but movies have been going for much, much longer than that. And the thing is, so many of them have never been reviewed by us. But that’s where IGN’s Flashback Reviews come in, so today we’re jumping almost 90 years back in time to talk about one of the greatest horror movies ever made… if you can even call it a horror movie, that is: Bride of Frankenstein!

Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is an icon, even if most people have never actually seen the only film in which the character appeared. Her image is instantly recognizable – the lightning-striped, shocked bouffant, the bandaged arms and sweeping gown, the impeccably scarred yet beautiful face. Oh, and the hiss – don’t forget the hiss! And this despite the poor creature only getting about four minutes of screentime in total. Again, 90 years ago.

But the birth of the Bride also came at a critical moment for the horror genre, as the looming dangers of censorship would soon drain much of the life out of the creative boom that had led to the film in the first place.

When director James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein was released in 1935, the horror genre was at the peak of a vast surge in popularity. The huge success in 1931 of the Bride’s Universal Monsters predecessor Dracula, and her would-be-paramour, Frankenstein’s Monster, meant that every mummy, invisible man, black cat, raven, and werewolf in town was about to get their own picture. Meanwhile, Fredric March had won the Oscar in 1932 for playing not just Dr. Jekyll, but also that awful Mr. Hyde (tying with Wallace Beery for the boxing flick The Champ, by the way). Horror was big, and monsters were where horror was at.

The funny thing is, James Whale didn’t actually want to make a sequel to his original Frankenstein, despite its success. You can't blame him, having helmed three horror films in the previous four years with Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man. But the director’s mischievous leanings that were already popping up in those pictures would become the lifeblood of Bride, a film that is as much a great comedy as it is a monster movie.

Right off the bat, the film feels bigger than its predecessor, as the title credits reveal Franz Waxman’s foreboding score, before segueing into the melodious Bride’s theme. The first Frankenstein film, having been produced at the cusp of the advent of sound, featured minimal music, instead leaning into frequent spans of crackling silence. But Bride’s new scope, hinted at in this music, is immediately confirmed as Whale’s opening scene takes us for a humorous if unexpected visit to Frankenstein’s very creator, Mary Shelley, along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, as the three chatter about ghost stories on a stormy night.

As such, Bride of Frankenstein begins in an elegant drawing room of the Romantic Era, where the Rs roll with aplomb and audiences – still in the midst of the Great Depression – surely could only look on in wonder. Played by the uniquely off-kilter Elsa Lanchester – who of course would also play the Bride at the end of the film – Mary seems to speak directly of the viewer, and to the viewer, at one point: “Such an audience needs something stronger than a pretty little love story. So why shouldn't I write of monsters?” No doubt this well-placed bit of dialogue by Whale and his writers is also a jab at the recently implemented self-censoring Hays Code, which would soon hobble many a horror movie in Hollywood.

Why was horror so popular during those dark days of the Depression? Much has been written on the topic, and it seems safe to say that in 1935 audiences were seeking some kind of escapism in the dark safety of the movie house. But there’s also the more lurid, violent, and sexual aspects of these films, elements which folks obviously wanted to indulge in, and ironically the very same aspects that the Hays Code would soon crack down on, taking away much of the spark that had fueled the genre. Viewers wouldn’t have known it at the time, but when the Bride is electrified to life, those four brief minutes of agony and ecstasy were sort of the climax for this heyday of horror.

So who are the monsters that Shelley is talking about in the prologue? Certainly not Boris Karloff’s sad-sack creature, who in a feat that would be replicated by every Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers who followed, managed to survive the unsurvivable climax of the previous film. Sure, he kills some people here or there, basically to keep the cheap seats happy, but that’s not what interests Whale in the character. While Karloff would later say that he wasn’t particularly fond of the development, the typically mute Monster famously acquires the power of speech in this picture. This leads to some humorous moments – you’ll never forget seeing Karloff half-choking on a cigar – as well as some dark ones, as when the Monster proclaims that he “loves dead… hates living.” The actor can still be scary as the towering Monster, of course, but it’s his moments of pathos and humanity – there, I said it – that work best in Bride.

Certainly the brief time he spends living happily with the blind old man who he encounters in the forest can only end in heartbreaking fashion – even if the whole set-up has become a well-trodden trope by today’s standards. As the old man attempts to teach the Monster about the difference between good and bad, one can’t help but peer past the script and see a meditation on the world in which Whale and his audience were living, survivors of a World War now living through another unimaginably difficult time.

Nor is Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein a villain. Indeed, while Henry was a crackpot who caused a ton of problems for everyone in the first film, in Bride he becomes more of an unwilling participant in the bigger action – almost a bystander. Sure, he’s one of the two creators of the Bride, but he does so under duress. Poor Clive, meanwhile, seems aged and stricken here, a not surprising result, perhaps, of what the character has been through, but one tempered by the knowledge that in reality the actor was reportedly suffering from alcoholism and would die just two years after the film’s release.

But we must look to Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius to find the real monster in Bride of Frankenstein. An old mentor of Henry’s, Pretorius shows up to convince Henry to create a new creature with him. He shows off his own dabblings in creating life, specifically weird little men and women who he keeps in jars; this reveal makes for a really odd scene that’s kind of silly but just another example of how Whale didn’t only make this sequel bigger than the first film, but also insisted on branching out in surprising ways with it. Audiences in 1935 expecting more of the same after the first film were in for a surprise.

Thesiger is another highlight, long noted for his camp portrayal and the queer coding that he brings to Bride. Pretorius is the kind of guy who sends his men out to find “fresh” hearts that he can use in his experiments, while also enjoying some wine and dinner over a coffin in a newly robbed crypt. Would you like a cigar? It is his only weakness, you know.

The production design is sweeping. Throwing continuity to the wind, Castle Frankenstein now features arched ceilings everywhere, sometimes lit seemingly only by flickering candlelight. The Bride’s creation scene is somehow even more spectacular than the first film’s, and indeed, the set pieces are exciting and often beautiful to behold. Whale didn’t hesitate to throw some Christ imagery into the proceedings here or there, but hey, this is the same guy who literally had Dr. Frankenstein throw dirt in the face of a statue of Death in the first film, so let him have his fun. The world of Frankenstein that Whale creates is not the real world – monsters notwithstanding – but rather something closer to a dreamed state. His affinity for using painted and lit backdrops to serve as the cloudy horizon and sky in certain scenes never really makes such scenes feel like they’re truly taking place outdoors; instead, what you wind up with is a sort of otherness, a heightened and theatrical feeling that pushes things just a notch into the fantastic. (Whale made his name in the theater, after all, and incorporates here some of the tricks he learned there.)

Of course, this also raises the question of how modern audiences, who have been trained to expect perfect, computer-generated recreations of just about any setting in their movies and TV, might react to a near-century-old picture like this. I think what it comes down to is less about how the film looks and more about how it makes one feel. The Bela Lugosi Dracula, for example, hasn’t aged all that well. Yes, horror and film fans might still appreciate it on multiple levels, but it’s also the kind of movie that tends to elicit unintentional laughs from modern audiences. Bride of Frankenstein, on the other hand, remains as funny today as it surely was in 1935, perhaps even more so. But it’s not a case of us laughing at the movie; no, we’re laughing with it. I think there’s a difference there, and as a result the Bride’s film is kind of timeless.

By the time Elsa Lanchester finally appears as the title character, at around the one-hour, 10-minute mark (of a one-hour, 14-minute movie!), it’s been a long wait for this legend to arrive, but a worthwhile one. Lanchester doesn’t attempt to mimic Karloff in any way. No, her time is limited, and she makes the most of it with her tics and quick, halting, bird-like movements, and of course that hiss. As Dr. Pretorius announces her to the world – “The Bride of Frankenstein!” – little could he, or Whale, or the audiences sitting in the darkened theater, for that matter, have known that the Golden Age of 1930s horror had just peaked.

The Pixel 10a has arrived to give Google fans a newer affordable option at $499. But apart from a few minor design tweaks, the addition of Satellite SOS, and a slight extension to the software support window, the Pixel 10a doesn’t shake things up. While it would prove a good option if every other phone stuck to its retail price, there’s no ignoring the fact that the Pixel 10a is launching months after the Pixel 10 has already seen discounts as low as $550.

Pixel 10a – Design and Features

Google’s Pixel 10a isn’t revolutionary or even exciting. It borrows the tame looks of the Pixel 9a, which had eschewed the eye-catching camera bar of mainline Pixel models. But where the Pixel 9a’s cameras rose up slightly from the back of the phone, the Pixel 10a’s cameras actually sit slightly below the back surface. This was a point Google emphasized in its launch, but it’s not a unique technical achievement considering RedMagic’s bold gaming phones have done so for a few years running.

The display is respectable, but pretty much no phone at or over $500 can get away with much less. The 6.3-inch screen offers a fair 1080x2424 resolution that’s plenty sharp for most uses. It can run smooth at 120Hz but doesn’t have the ability to drop down to 1Hz for extra efficiency. Still, it’s hard to get mad at a colorful OLED that can reach as high as 3000 nits.

The display is flanked by stereo speakers. One ports out the bottom of the phone while the other is tucked into the earpiece. They put out decent volume, though I found them a touch harsh while gaming and had trouble hearing podcasts in the kitchen over cooking noises.

The phone’s footprint is modest. It’s larger than the Pixel 9 but mostly smaller than the Pixel 9a save for a slight bump to thickness. It’s comfortable in the hand but doesn’t feel totally compact. Part of that is because its 6.3-inch display still has somewhat thick bezels all the way around. Google claims they’re thinner than the Pixel 9a’s bezels, but neither are competing for record thinness.

The choices Google made for what to pack into the compact frame are interesting. It made some nice inclusions, like a physical SIM slot to complement the eSIM support. The phone gets a USB 3.2 port for faster wired data transmission. Google even opted to include the necessary hardware for Satellite SOS, something the Pixel 9a missed out on.

Google left some surprising things out, though. There are no magnets to allow for Qi2 and Pixelsnap accessories. The Pixel 10a can still wirelessly charge, but only at up to 10 watts. And though 30W charging is supported, you’ll need to have your own capable charging brick.

The Pixel 10a can unlock with facial recognition or an under-display fingerprint scanner. Both worked quickly in my testing.

Durability should be OK but not amazing. Gaskets are built in to give the phone a commendable IP68 water resistance to keep dust and water out even under almost five feet of water. The plastic back material feels nice and glassy, but shouldn’t shatter like glass if dropped. Gorilla Glass 7i on the front has avoided blemishing in my time testing, but it doesn’t promise as extreme drop- or scratch-resistance as the Gorilla Glass Victus showing up on more flagship phones. The phone gets an aluminum frame, and Google matches it to the rear color, but this can scratch up

Pixel 10a – Software

The Pixel 10a comes running on Android 16 and Google promises 7 years of support with OS and security updates alongside its Pixel Drops, which brings new features now and then. This long-term support may be one of the Pixel 10a’s most compelling features, as this kind of support is already rare for any phone, let alone one without a flagship price tag.

Some highlight features of the Pixel 10a’s software are support for Auto Best Take and Camera Coach in the camera app, helping users frame photos and capture group shots without anyone blinking. The phone also supports a new Quick-share feature that’s compatible with iPhone’s Air Drop. In testing, this let me share a file directly with an iPhone with just a couple taps.

Pixel 10a – Gaming and Performance

The Pixel 10a didn’t get any notable under-the-hood upgrades. It has the same Tensor G4 chip that the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9a came running on. That chip was already trailing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips when it launched, and the gulf is only widening. Its 8GB of RAM is less than the Pixel 9 included, but hasn’t been an impediment in regular use.

It’s not as though the Pixel 10a is slow. In everyday use, it’s been able to keep up just fine. It fluidly ramps up to 120Hz for smooth animations while swiping around, and it browses the web without fuss. It can handle light games well. I played an hour of Carrion and the phone only got slightly warm, and I couldn’t tell whether that was because of the game or just the phone's curious tendency to get a little warm. It even handled Rainbow Six Mobile at Ultra settings smoothly. Bigger, more demanding games like Where Winds Meet can’t go all-out, though. The Pixel 10a was able to run the game at its Ultra graphics preset, but it was capped to 30fps. It largely maintained that framerate at least. The phone seems to throttle enough to avoid getting hot in use, but warmth is almost constant.

While serviceably fast, the performance limits that exist today are only going to become bigger impediments in the future as more demanding games and apps arrive. So even if Google continues to support the phone with software updates, its hardware may simply not be viable for much at the end of that support window.

Compared to other recent devices, the Pixel 10a’s performance leaves a lot to be desired. It falls shy of the budget Poco X7 Pro in multi-core and graphical performance by a considerable amount. That only widens when facing off against a more potent device like the OnePlus 15R, which the Pixel 10a tended to fall anywhere from 30 to 50% behind. The Pixel 10 also comes out ahead of the Pixel 10a, albeit not with much of a graphical bump to speak of. And though it may seem like an obvious outcome for the Pixel 10 to exceed the Pixel 10a, it matters for potential buyers because the Pixel 10 has already seen discounts that bring its price far closer to the 10a’s price than MSRP would have you believe.

The battery life of the Pixel 10a is good, but not impressive. It fits in a 5,100mAh pack just like the 9a, and it’s been good for all-day battery life with a little juice to spare. But the phone seems to have a bit more passive drain overnight than I’d like, so I don’t expect to easily get through two days of heavy use.

Pixel 10a – Cameras

The cameras have generally been a highlight of Pixel phones, and though the budget series makes some sacrifices, they can still perform well. That said, the Pixel 10a does nothing new. It has the exact same camera system as the Pixel 9a. Considering that it has the same SoC as the Pixel 9a, there’s really nothing new this phone can do in the camera department.

• 48MP wide, f/1.7, 1/2”, OIS, EIS
• 13MP ultrawide, f/2.2, 1/3.1”, 120-degree FoV
• 13MP Selfie, f/2.2, 96.1-degree FOV

It’s not entirely bad news. The main sensor was great last year and is still great this year. It captures plenty of light, helping make the most of even dim environments. It provides sharp and colorful images with a ton of detail. The wide aperture also lends to a soft background blur when taking close-ups.

Google would say the sensor is good enough to zoom in digitally, but most shots I took with digital zoom don’t hold up well when viewed at full size. Zooming into 2x on the phone does have some advantages over simply zooming in on a 1x photo, as the phone does extra noise reduction and sharpening, though even that doesn’t make it a great photo.

The ultra-wide sensor is useful to have for getting extra perspective on large and close subjects. It gets a good amount of detail, even if it can get soft around the edges. It’s not a perfect complement to the main sensor, though, as I caught it shifting the color temperature from the main sensor, which can make for an inconsistent series of photos. The tighter aperture also doesn’t let it perform as well in dim environments, so where the main sensor may be capturing crisp and clear shots, switching to the ultra-wide sensor could lead to noisy photos.

The selfie camera is also acceptable. It gets decent light and natural colors alongside a wide enough FOV to capture a couple of friends in the same shot.

While not mind-blowing, the quality of the cameras on the Pixel 10a is still enough to keep it somewhat protected against the OnePlus 15R or Poco X7 Pro for anyone who prioritizes photos over gaming performance. That said, it still leaves the Pixel 10a facing off against the reality that the Pixel 10 has been (and almost surely will be again) on sale for $550-$600, and offers a big advantage with its additional telephoto sensor.

Mark Knapp is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything electronics and gaming hardware. He has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry with bylines at PCMag, Reviewed, CNET, and more. Find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.

War Machine premieres Friday, March 6 on Netflix.

Not to be confused with Netflix's 2017 Brad Pitt war satire of the same name, this War Machine stars Reacher's mammoth Alan Ritchson. He's a nearly aged-out Army Ranger hopeful (with a haunted past) whose two-hour Armed Forces commercial gets interrupted by a giant death robot from outer space that's a bulky combination of Aliens-style Power Loader and Tron-esque Recognizer. War Machine is an action/sci-fi mashup in the vein of Predator that stands slightly (on its tippy toes) above most of streaming's unchallenging, disposable rabble, mostly due to a ferocious mass casualty event of a second act.

War Machine's threat of a giant boxy contraption, instead of an alien monster, saves us from possible shoddy CGI, but it also adds to the film's visual dryness. It's mostly a drab, brutalist shoot 'em up that lacks the uniqueness needed for a great sci-fi invasion story. Ritchson's "81" (everyone has a number instead of a name) and his squad are on a final training mission when they're ambushed by a giant intergalactic bot, which tests his mettle while blowing most everyone else to Kingdom Come.

During the death bot's second assault, War Machine ticks upward a bit as the movie flashes its fangs. There's a particular chase scene that stands out due to its mercilessness, and it's here that the movie feels powered by its own engine and not just set on riding the coattails of things that came before it and did it better. It's a shame that the rest of the movie was designed to be a merely adequate affair, unchallenging and dry. Because the sci-fi behemoth element adds a horror movie-style bit of crash therapy in a "the monster is grief" sort of way. War Machine could have been a much deeper, satisfying experience, but they make the choice, in the end, to tease a possible franchise, and that deflates the resolution.

Ritchson is very good in this, providing a nice mix of tortured vulnerability and hulkish heroics. His physical hugeness takes a back seat in War Machine, as he's covered up for most of the movie in combat gear, but just knowing he's swole helps sell 81's unsettling obsession with durability and going the distance. 81 also comes with a tragic, recent past that gets unspooled throughout this crucible. Jai Courtney has a small but important role here as 81's brother, feeding into the redemption arc that helps give 81 layers as a character. Far more layers than the supporting soldiers, who, save for two, only get the barest of focus. They're mostly just faces in the chaos.

The blueprints for War Machine, as an action movie, are solid. The hero has a bone to pick with the universe. The universe sends a bone to pick. But this doesn't save it from moments of feeling like stodgy four-quadrant content. And the way the cosmic blastoid bot gets defeated, its weakness, is super silly. Almost enough to take you out of the story. No, it's not a big red "power off" button on its face but... that's not far off. Ultimately, War Machine -- which also stars Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, and Stephan James (as one of the soldiers with "more to do") -- will rest comfortably as a medium-fine flick that you'll never watch again.

Hoppers is in theaters now.

It’s not exactly a new observation to say that Pixar’s once golden reputation is not what it used to be. The 3D animation studio has never disappeared from the cultural conversation, but after revolutionizing the industry in the 1990s and delivering a string of unqualified masterpieces in the 2000s, Pixar has only occasionally reached the level of greatness that was once synonymous with their name. Part of that is because of their overreliance on sequels, but even their newer originals don’t always match the pedigree of all-time greats like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, or Wall-E. Their latest film, the sci-fi animal comedy Hoppers, is not on that level of inspiration, but it still comes out the other side as an entertaining and admirable effort.

Hoppers is about Mabel (Piper Curda), a failing college student and animal lover from the city of Beaverton who is trying to protect a beloved glade from being demolished by a highway construction project. She’s opposed in this effort by Beaverton mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), who insists he’s received the construction permits because the glade’s animals have already vacated the premises. No points for guessing that the animals didn’t leave purely of their own accord, but Mabel’s investigation into why leads her through a circuitous series of events that result in her mind being placed inside the body of a robotic beaver created by one of her professors. Mabel uses the “hopping” (as in, brain hopping) technology to communicate with the animals and figure out how to get them to move back.

There’s actually a lot more to the plot than this basic premise, with director Daniel Chong and writer Jesse Andrews’ story possessing a certain madcap energy as it moves through numerous big ideas and fresh complications. The frenzied pace ensures it never loses the audience’s attention, but it does feel like Hoppers would succeed better at its emotional moments if it were willing to let the story sit and breathe more often. But what keeps the film anchored is the throughline of Mabel’s desire to make “just one thing” work out at a time when she feels like everything has fallen apart, and why her overeager efforts sometimes make things worse despite her intentions. She’s assisted in this journey by King George (Bobby Moynihan), the friendly monarch of the local mammal kingdom, who tries to see the best in everyone even to a fault.

I really have nothing but good things to say about King George; while Hoppers isn’t one of Pixar’s best movies, King George does deserve a spot among their best characters. He’s a hard character to make work because his main trait is his inherent goodness and basic empathy for literally everyone and everything, which would make for a boring figure in the wrong hands. But Moynihan’s performance and Andrews’ script ensure his somewhat naive worldview makes sense because he wholeheartedly believes it, willing the best out of others by seeing it before they do. The relationship between him and Mabel may hit one or two predictable dramatic beats, but their chemistry still wins out by the film’s final act.

That said, the way King George runs his kingdom and how it relates to the film's world-building is one of Hoppers’ biggest drawbacks. King George’s forest abides by “pond rules,” which can be basically summed up as “we’re all in this together” (literally said out loud in dialogue). This is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t square logically when you think it through. Similarly to 2024’s The Wild Robot, Hoppers gets a bit cutesy with its talking animal community, showing predator and prey all being friendly with each other, although Hoppers introduces the caveat that it’s okay for the predators to eat “when they’re hungry,” hand-waving the conflict with deaths treated as gags. Sure, it’s amusing when an animal explaining pond rules is inexplicably eaten mid-speech, but it doesn’t change that it’s a band-aid for an irreconcilable problem with the setting’s believability.

Hoppers’ lack of verisimilitude is what keeps it from matching Pixar’s top tier efforts. Pixar films such as Monsters Inc. or The Incredibles created worlds that were entirely separate from our own, which allowed their bizarre rules to still come off as internally consistent. But when Finding Nemo was clearly set in our world (beyond the “animals can talk” conceit), it didn’t move into the fantastical, basically playing fair with our understanding of how animals behave even with their anthropomorphized personalities. Hoppers feels akin to Finding Nemo in terms of what it’s trying to narratively accomplish with its world, but takes on too many extra incongruous elements. That ability to buy into the logic of a film’s setting is what lets the audience also buy into the emotional stakes of the characters, and this is where Hoppers starts to fall apart.

Between a surprise villain whose plan is established and thwarted far too quickly to leave real impact, the confusing detail that Mabel has to be the one to explain to the animal monarchs that humans are encroaching on their territory so they’re pushed into action (wouldn’t they know that already?), and a well-meaning but ultimately disingenuous end to the conflict between Mabel and Jerry, Hoppers has a few too many rough edges to get full marks. But the film still features plenty of humor and sharply directed sequences (of particular note is how it finds a hilarious way for a shark to participate in a car chase). It also goes out on a high note, delivering a sweet conclusion for Mabel and King George that doesn’t undo what was sacrificed in order to get there.