I’m at the point in Fields of Mistria where I’ve started talking to my dragon statue, Caldarus, and telling my pink dog to do chores. If that interests you, even without context, then you probably have a lot to look forward to. Fields of Mistria is the type of farming sim I wish I had in my youth – it resembles early 2000s cozy classics from Harvest Moon to Animal Crossing, all mixed together into an anime-coded concoction. The world of Mistria is brimming with lore and its villagers have distinct personalities that shine through in their dialogue. I can tell I still have a while before I’ve seen everything its newly released 1.0 update has to offer, but I already can’t wait to learn more about my new home and neighbors.

This fantasy farming sim takes place in a pastel pixel art world where mythical creatures and magic exist, but not in a way that dominates the otherwise down to earth tasks that are asked of you. I sometimes forget I’m in a magical world when I’m just farming and talking to villagers, and those humble tasks are plenty amusing as is. However, when I walk into the bathhouse and see a giant witch’s cauldron bubbling in the open, it sets me straight. It feels like a farming sim with a fantasy RPG skin over it – similar to Rune Factory, but less overt – so most of my attention goes to the actual farming loop.

Fields of Mistria is about the farming first and foremost, asking you to care for crops, till soil, chop wood, and so on. It’s neat that you can also catch fish and insects and donate them to a local museum like in Animal Crossing, as well play with enticing cooking and crafting systems that I have yet to dig into. While a lot of this might sound fairly standard, you can also improve your capabilities by giving spiritual currency to Caldarus for power-ups, like the ability to sometimes get seeds back when you harvest plants or replenish energy when watering.

I saw these activities as a way to speed toward my goals: to revitalize Mistria and grow my farm. However, I couldn’t rush toward that target immediately, and I’m glad that's the case. I had the urge to start grinding for gold right away, but I was too broke to buy seeds and didn’t have the equipment to clear sticks and rocks from my farm. Instead of having access to all tools and skills from the beginning, I unlocked them one by one, and I appreciated how that forced me to slow down and really take notice of the town and its inhabitants.

A day in Mistria can last as little as 12 minutes and 30 seconds in real-world time. My average day took at least 20 minutes, though, because I talked to every single person I passed and often paused to flip through menus (inventory, relationship journal, etc). I spent my first few days completing requests for villagers and ended up getting to know many of them, even ones I wasn’t particularly interested in. These requests, which seemed like simple fetch quests at first, impressed me with the little stories that sometimes came with them. Need some lilacs? Well, you may have just signed up to be a lab experiment.

Some farming sims make me feel like I’m watching a performance, where the characters only exist in my personal bubble and don’t do anything outside of that. Fields of Mistria does the opposite. Seeing characters interact based on a shared history with each other made me feel like an actual newcomer who had a lot to learn about the relationships and unique quirks that this town had to offer. I especially appreciated Friday nights at the Sleeping Dragon Inn, which gather every villager into one spot for what feels like the whole day. It’s those moments that convinced me these people actually do talk to each other and have lives when I’m not actively witnessing them.

Their personalities stand out the most. Even for characters who are based on anime stereotypes (like March, who is unapologetically a tsundere), developer NPC Studio finds a way to enhance them through effective dialogue. Even when I’m mad at March because he insinuated that I’m a leech for accepting a free pickaxe from his brother, I can show up to the bar on Friday and he’s suddenly buddy-buddy with me after a few drinks. Meanwhile, the little girl at the inn told me that she would put the local Blackfire lookalike in jail for making stinky potions. Sometimes, their words just make me laugh, and it’s worth mentioning when a game like this actually makes me want to read all the dialogue and not just skip it.

Another interesting quirk: the villagers actually react to you. For example, someone may go out of their way to tell you where to find a particular item for your fetch quest, or mention something that happened in the past. I haven’t seen anything mindboggling yet, but it’s still a nice touch to add immersiveness to the world.

I do have a few gripes with Fields of Mistria so far, but they are mostly tied to my current progress in the storyline. It can sometimes feel like a chore to run back and forth between my farm, especially when I haven’t upgraded my inventory yet and my tools take up half the space. Also, for some reason, my character will occasionally swap to an awkwardly slow pace while moving. As far as I know, that’s a bug that pops up under uncertain circumstances, and I haven’t found the right sweet spot for my setup yet.

I’ve played a lot of farming sims, even bad ones, for many hours. At this point, I have faith that I’m still climbing towards the peak of what Fields of Mistria has to offer, especially since the completion of the Town Repair Storyline and marriage were just added with the 1.0 update. It’s so early that I have yet to fill up a heart for any character, let alone a love interest. And yet, I’ve had more than enough time to know I really like what I’ve seen so far, and I’m eager to keep going until I'm ready for my final review.

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 8, “The Traitors of Tumbleton.”

Back in the day, Game of Thrones typically delivered its big action beats in a season’s penultimate episode and spent the finale wrapping up loose ends and setting the stakes for the following year. House of the Dragon is a different beast: this season began and ended with all-out war, and if anything, this finale leaves too many loose ends dangling. If it’s less punch-the-air satisfying than the season opener, it may have more consequential revelations for what’s to come.

In King’s Landing, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) continues to make one unforced error after another. Driven to near hysteria by the news that Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) has survived, she exiles one of her more clear-eyed advisers, Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) and baffles her subjects, speaking to them about prophecies – occasionally in High Valyrian – when they’re worried about putting food on the table.

More troublingly, she makes a classic Henry II of England error and has the head of her church assassinated in his cathedral. That didn’t go well for Henry, who sparked widespread unrest and had to make significant concessions to the Pope to settle things down, and doesn’t seem likely to go well for Rhaenyra either. Perhaps significantly, Rhaenyra has the generally likeable Alyn (Abubakar Salim) strike the fatal blow. His brother Addam (Clinton Liberty) accused him of being overly ambitious and under Rhaenyra’s thumb; he may have had a point. Rhaenyra is no longer as hesitant as she once was, but fear has also made her vicious. The woman who hisses commands to Alyn in the Sept is not the same one who wrung her hands over violence last season. Something has broken in her; she may no longer be one of the Targaryens capable of greatness.

We also bade farewell this week to Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), who has given one of the most quietly and consistently compelling performances this season as a woman who knows how tragically it’s all going to play out. The manner of her death – she threw herself out a window – was the same as the book, but there are some differences: her youngest son, Maelor, was born before her death on the page, and met his own tragic end. This is less horrible than the murder of an infant might have been, but it’s plenty disturbing. Her final scenes with Rhaenyra are also superbly done: watch how Viserys’ older daughter, when she tries to force Helaena to eat, impatiently puts aside the very tapestry that might have given her the answers she so desperately sought.

At Harrenhal, Aegon arrives on Sunfyre and resolves to work together with his wayward brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) for maybe the first time in their lives – albeit not before slapping him around a bit and threatening to kill him for, in fairness, his attempt on Aegon’s life. But Aemond’s obvious guilt and true repentance saves him; the pair set off to find the still-missing Vhagar and take the fight to Rhaenyra. We also learn, by the way, that Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) is the former Lady of Harrenhal. She was the wife of Black Harren, its builder, and was cursed to remain in the limits of its lands and never die when she sought dark powers in the forest to save the life of her badly-burned son. Alys’ background was never established fully in the book, so this is a new and potentially pretty potent wrinkle. In fact, Aegon and Aemond’s reconciliation is also new territory, and it’s going to be interesting to see how much trouble that terrible twosome get into as a united front.

The majority of the episode, however, concerns the attack on Tumbleton. Despite the efforts of the late Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), the Rivermen have arrived en masse and Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) has flown down on Caraxes to take command and, oh yes, flame anyone who needs flamed. Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), one of the most likeable characters on the board and therefore probably doomed, tries to make peace by offering the return of the imprisoned Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), but no dice. He and Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) are left trying to survive in the besieged city; it’s not clear by the end of the episode that Daeron is OK.

Meanwhile, Ormund is searching desperately for his ace in the hole, the dragonrider Ulf (Tom Bennett), who is so excited about his heel turn that he’s drunk himself into a stupor. Here, Ormund makes an ultimately fatal mistake. He’s so overcome by the stink of the privy where he finally discovers Ulf that he entirely loses his temper and whales on the other man. Ulf still does his bidding long enough to flame half the army of Rivermen – but he then turns his fury, and Silverwing, on Tumbleton itself and Ormund in particular. So long, you prissy little manbaby bully.

Ulf is not the only dragonrider who’s in trouble this week: Hugh (Kieran Bew) also left his post in King’s Landing to look for his wife in Tumbleton, running in with the ground forces, while Baela (Bethany Antonia) is grounded in the Keep after daring to criticise Rhaenyra. As for the episode’s title, there are any number of candidates. Ulf obviously, but Hugh also disobeys orders to go to Tumbleton. Daeron and Gwayne both betray Ormund in attempting to sue for peace; Ormund has arguably betrayed Aegon in elevating Daeron. And Daemon accuses Corlys of treachery when he argues for peace. There’s a lot of it going around.

The end result is shellshocked troops stumbling around a charred battlefield, trying to collect corpses, while Caraxes and Hugh’s Vermithor chase off Ulf’s Silverwing. The Battle of Tumbleton is – at best – a draw for the Blacks, and if it’s a victory for the Greens it might prove to be a Pyrrhic one, what with the loss of Ormund, their best strategist, and the uncertain fate of Ulf and Silverwing afterwards.

At this point it’s a positive disadvantage to have read the books; some of us have been waiting for one face-off for nearly half a decade now, since that could plausibly have happened at the end of Season 1 or the start of Season 2. Now we will have to wait two more years if it’s even going to happen as written. The overall shape of the show is also becoming more evident, and something that I wrote about last season seems to be taking shape (read that here if you’re not scared of major spoilers). Whether showrunner Ryan Condal and his team can stick the landing for the finale better than Game of Thrones did remains to be seen, but they have made a great foundation for it this year.

Sometimes it feels like XR glasses are the next frontier when it comes to gaming accessories. And it makes sense, with the rise of handheld gaming PCs – at least before RAM prices started making them nigh unaffordable – these glasses are a great way to get something like the Steam Deck a bigger screen while you’re away from home.

So, it makes sense that Asus would team up with XReal to make a bespoke pair of gaming glasses, especially off the back of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. And when the glasses are plugged straight into a handheld, the ROG XReal R1 is awesome, with a clear picture and some nice RGB lighting. But, these glasses cost $849, and at least part of that goes to the dock, which allows you to connect multiple devices through HDMI and DisplayPort. That’s a cool concept, but it ends up being the worst part of the entire package.

Design and Features

Out of all the XR gaming glasses I’ve tried so far, none of them look especially good. Just due to the fact that there needs to be displays, mirrors and whatever else built into the glasses themselves, the format lends itself to bulky, garish designs. The ROG XReal R1s are no different.

The little hood that houses the displays measures about an inch thick, which naturally makes the glasses protrude a bit from your face. The outward-facing lenses, then, have this angular design that does look a bit more attractive than something like the Viture Beast, but not by much.

The ROG XReal R1 does hide the little camera that powers head tracking a bit better than most of its contemporaries, though. The entire front of the glasses is one piece of dark plastic, with a small section kind of boxed off in the center. The 3DoF sensor lies in that little boxed off section, and if I didn’t know that these kinds of glasses need a camera sensor to function, I wouldn’t have even guessed that it was there.

There are plenty of these kinds of glasses out there that try to at least maintain an air of professionalism. The Viture Beast, for example, prides itself as being great for productivity. But the temples of the ROG XReal R1 are about as ROG as you can get. In the middle of each temple are nine RGB lighting zones, arranged in little diagonal lines. By default they have the standard cycling rainbow effect we’ve all seen a million times, but you can change the lighting by messing with the settings.

Most of the time, you’ll do that through the buttons found on the left temple. On the bottom, you have a button that either centers the screen in your field of view, or opens the settings if you double tap it. Behind that button is what you’d expect to just be a volume rocker, but instead pressing it in either direction will bring up a little menu with which you can adjust things like tint, screen size, and, well, the volume.

The speakers are also in the temples, and they’re fine. They’re loud enough that you’ll be able to clearly hear the game you’re playing, but they’re not great at drowning out everything around. That’ll be fine for most people, but if you really want to get immersed in your game, or you just don’t want people around you to hear what you’re playing or watching, you should probably use some headphones.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a pair of XR glasses where the menu setup was intuitive, and the ROG XReal R1 follows that trend. After fiddling around with it for a couple of hours, everything did kind of click – but there’s a definite learning curve.

Everything changes once you plug the glasses into the dock though. The dock itself looks even more like a generic ROG accessory than the glasses do. It’s essentially a gemstone-shaped hunk of plastic with angular lines engraved into it. Shockingly, though, despite the need for dedicated power in the back of it, there is no RGB. The only lighting to speak of are indicator lights that tell you whether or not connected devices are on.

Above those lights are two triangular buttons and a little control stick. The button on the left is the power, and the triangle on the right turns on fps boost. This essentially lowers the resolution and ups the refresh rate from 120Hz to 240Hz. That sounds cool, but in practice it ended up with a glitchy picture where looking at text instantly gave me a headache.

The little control stick is how you’ll usually mess with the settings. There are shortcuts, where pushing to the right, for example, will switch the glasses between Anchor mode – where the display is held in one space – and Follow mode, where, you guessed it, the display follows you wherever you look. Most of these controls work fine, even though it is easier to use the buttons on the glasses. After all, when you’re using the glasses your vision is going to be a bit obscured, so it’s a bit awkward to try and look at what you’re doing down on your desk.

On the back of the dock, you’ll find two USB-C ports, one of which supplies power, along with two HDMI ports and a DisplayPort. Then, on the front is another USB-C port, which is meant for the glasses themselves.

However, the biggest problem with the dock was that when you push the stick upwards, it’s supposed to toggle between different visual profiles. That’s pretty standard for monitors these days, but for some reason, it simply didn’t work on the unit I reviewed. Even after updating the firmware and trying several different devices, the ROG XReal R1 was stuck on “Racing” mode the entire time I was reviewing it.

That mode didn’t necessarily look bad but, it’s always a bit of a red flag when a button just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.

The dock being mediocre would be one thing if it was just an added accessory, but you can’t buy these glasses without it. And given that XReal and Asus are asking $849, when the XReal 1S is just $449 for a pretty similar experience, it does make you wonder how much extra you’re paying for the dock.

Performance and Gaming

By itself, the Asus ROG XReal R1 is a 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate that sits on your face. Asus and XReal talk a big game about the actual display too, claiming brightness of up to 700 nits, and that it's 106% of the sRGB color gamut. I can’t actually test that, because the display is too small for a colorimeter. However, at its best, the display is quite colorful, though it is a little washed out and dim most of the time – but that might be the visual profile that the glasses were stuck on.

When the glasses are plugged into something like the Xbox Ally X, they’re pretty solid. Games look great, and XReal has done a lot of work to make text less of a pain to read. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this is still a 1080p display. You can stretch the display out to the equivalent of a 171-inch display, but when you do, the image can start to look a little pixel-y. The sweet spot, then, is having a smaller display in follow mode. That way, you can see the entire display without moving your head, and it’s not so blown up that you start to see the imperfections of the 1080p image.

I spent quite a bit of time laying in bed and replaying Final Fantasy XIII on the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with these glasses, and the game looked great – if a little dated. But one of the cool features on these glasses is an instant 3D mode. For some reason, that just wouldn’t work when plugged into the dock, but when plugged straight into the handheld it used the X1 chip built into the glasses to transform FFXIII into a 3D game.

That wasn’t perfect, obviously, but it kind of made it look like I was playing the game on a very large 3DS. But, because it was strapped to my face, rather than held awkwardly in front of me, the 3D effect didn’t immediately give me a headache as soon as I moved my head a little bit. I don’t know if I’d use the ‘Instant 3D’ mode all the time, but it is a cool little effect that adds, well, another dimension to whichever game you’re playing.

The big selling point of this ROG and XReal crossover, though, is plugging in a gaming PC or console and playing via the dock. After fighting with a firmware update, this worked fine enough. The display doesn’t change all that much when it's plugged into the dock, so it was still a good 1080p image, just with the same weird text shimmer that all XR glasses have right now.

But as soon as I enabled the 240Hz mode, everything went downhill. Motion is smoother with this mode turned on, there’s no doubt about that, but pixels that aren’t supposed to be moving start wiggling around a little bit. There’s this strange shimmer to the glasses when the 240Hz mode is turned on that makes subtitles actually painful to read and makes the rest of the image look downright strange, like static elements of the scene are moving somehow.

This problem goes away as soon as you push the little triangle button to swap the refresh rate back to 120Hz. I’m not sure what’s causing the problem, or even if I’m just particularly sensitive to it, but I’ve used plenty of regular 240Hz monitors without seeing that weird behavior.

It’s just another point against the dock, though. Really, the benefit of the dock is just the ability to easily plug in a gaming PC or a PS5. That’s a neat feature, to be sure, and I loved playing a bit of Beast of Reincarnation on these glasses through my gaming PC. But that’s not worth twice the added cost over the $449 XReal 1S or the $549 Viture Beast.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

From the first pregame animation I watched, Madden NFL 27 had a presence I haven't felt in this series a while. The expression of the players, the roar of the crowd, and even the coaching staff on the sidelines felt right, as if I was watching Week 1 six weeks early. I've only played a few hours of this year's Madden so far, but I've already noticed some immediate improvements, while other aspects will likely be a slow burn before I fully understand what's going on as I work toward my final review. Still, Madden 27 has already made a better impression on me than its predecessor, which gives me confidence that EA Sports may be on to something here.

For starters, the reworked passing game is instantly impactful thanks to a new Timing-Based Catch mechanic. After passing the ball to a receiver, when I hold down the catch button, a meter will appear over my receiver's head. If I release the button in the meter's green zone, the receiver gains an advantage over the defender, which usually results in a completed pass. Conversely, if I hold the button too long or release it too quickly, I run the risk of dropping the pass, or worse, deflecting it to a defender.

This is an ingenious system that emphasizes how the quarterback and receiver should work in tandem on every pass play. I've been able to aim my passes and adjust the strength of the throw, but now I can also give my receiver the chance to make a spectacular play with clear and direct inputs, which makes it feel more like I was the one who brought the big catch to fruition. When that meter turns green, and the pass is completed, it's a genuine rush.

However, this new system takes time to lock down, as the timing can be very precise. Bullet passes are very difficult to land with this method, simply because the ball is coming at the receiver quickly, and my window for holding the catch button is smaller. Additionally, in modes like Quick Play where I control both the quarterback throwing the pass and the receiver catching it, it starts to feel like I'm entering fighting game move sequences with all of the button presses and directions that are required.

Thank goodness for the Skills Trainer mode, which conveniently groups all of Madden 27's changes into one tutorial mode and lets me try them as many times as I need. This is a great place to work out the timing on both the throws and the catches, along with other changes like a new tackling system that adds Conservative and Dive tackles to the mix, as well as new pass rush moves designed to get past the offensive line and into the quarterback's face.

The marquee change to Madden 27 is the Persona Engine, a new approach to Franchise mode that gives every player on your team motivations, goals, and desires. Pay your top stars well, and they'll be happy; neglect them, and you'll begin to hear words like "trade" and "holdout." While my franchise hasn't progressed enough yet to really see the engine in action, I have begun to see elements of what lies in front of me; Zack Baun, a starting linebacker for my beloved Philadelphia Eagles, is already talking about a new contract, and I don't look forward to negotiating that one.

Madden Ultimate Team also returns for another season, and of course it would as one of Madden's most popular modes. So far, my Philadelphia Cream Cheeses are slowly building into a fine team, with young studs like Cooper DeJean, locker room leaders like Calais Campbell, and legends like Kam Chancellor among my top players.

However, the MUT experience continues to be distilled into a simple pattern: Open packs, complete challenge, accrue packs, open packs, complete challenges, accrue packs, etc. I can take my team online against other MUTers, but other than the unique roster I've fostered, it's just the core Madden 27 gameplay again. Granted, "don't fix what isn't broken" certainly applies to a mode that many people enjoy, but I find it lacking after so many years of the same experience. Hopefully, with more time put in, I'll come around.

I've done a little bit of everything in Madden NFL 27, and so far, the on-field gameplay shines as usual. The new passing game is a tough nut to crack, but once I did, I really felt powerful under center. The new Persona Engine is already making itself known in Franchise mode, and I am excited to see more of it. So far so good, Madden; Expect my full review to hit early next week.

To know something's name is to understand it — at least just a little, be it the thing itself, or the world around it. In Big Walk, there are lots of things yet unnamed. You will certainly recognize trees, mountains, that dang cowbell. But there are plenty of things you won’t: the red, peanut-shaped objects my group calls a bean, which makes the structures they must be delivered to the bean towers. To us, the underground tunnel system is the backrooms, and the glowing medicine balls that light paths throughout the world are simply orbs – but not to be confused with the Big Orb, a mysterious and ominous structure looming in the distance. Big Walk is a co-op-only puzzle adventure that relies heavily on shared experience, shared language. Its genius lies in how it pushes you to decipher the logic behind the clever puzzles spread around its open world in a way that only you and your companions will understand. With all the twists and limitations it imposes, it’s unlike any other multiplayer game out there.

Big Walk is a puzzle game, and the puzzle is communication. Everyone is initially dropped into a playground of sorts with some colorful, blocklike structures to climb on, light switches to flip, and your controls pinned up as posters. I call this place home. Crucially, you are given no objective. We fiddle about with the buttons, obnoxiously clang the cowbell. We test out our movement options – mostly arm gestures – by looking at our shadows. Eventually, we head out into a lifelike world with lush foliage and waves breaking on the beach; it's a direct contrast to our charming, goofy characters, who are, essentially, a stack of three colored balls with googly eyes, stick arms, and twig legs (and a nose that moves like a mouth as we speak in-game).

When someone asked what we're supposed to do, what the objective of this game was, I couldn’t really answer that. And so we walked. But here's what I knew at this point: Big Walk has walking and puzzles. That, and outside of arm flailing or typing out written messages, we can only communicate through proximity-based voice chat. This means your voice is muffled when you're behind a wall, and echoes when you're in a vast tunnel. If someone wanders too far off, I can no longer hear them, and as a game that can only be played with others, it’s “cooperative” in the very sense of the term. There's no way to play Big Walk alone, and it supports up to 12 players with different settings for different sized groups: two, three, or four-plus, which adjusts puzzles slightly to suit the number of people in a session. Big Walk cleverly takes advantage of the essential limitation of proximity chat, and it wouldn't be the same without it.

Venturing out, my group of three walks together along desert terrain and up a cliffside until we find a button on a platform. We originally think nothing happens when it's pushed, but someone notices a faint red light flashing in the distance. It illuminates each time it's pressed, so we send someone in its direction to see what’s out there. There's a red bean in a box, which opens when the button is pushed. He grabs it and rushes back. No one knows what to do with it but it seems important, so we hold onto it (or try our best until someone drops it while falling off a cliff). Through that simple opening task, we start to get it: This puzzle, this bean, they’re teaching us something about the world and what we need to do within it. We're starting to create our own language.

Each piece of this map is cleverly designed to nudge your group to build something together, forms of communication that feel like only you understand. We keep walking, keep exploring and finding puzzles that require real teamwork, and continue to build our language. My group played in several sessions across a few days: a core group of three, with some stragglers jumping in here and there. We spent nearly 20 delightful hours romping around. It's easy for people to jump in and out of the session, popping in to adventure for a bit. There is a kink in this system, though. The save file is tied to the player who originally hosted the game. For my group, that was me. If my companions wanted to play when I wasn't there, they'd have to start a new save file—and a new big walk. This may very well be by design; developer House House wants a group to stick together. But I felt bad when someone wanted to play, but I couldn't.

Big Walk's world runs on a day-night cycle, with sun-soaked days and pitch-dark nights. And in the latter, a different kind of communication is built. Early on, my friend Riley dropped our only flashlight off a cliff, immediately after I accidentally kicked our walkie-talkie down the same one. We spent a not-insignificant amount of time looking for our tools because, without them, we could easily lose each other in the dead of night. (Even more so when looking for Riley, who got stuck in a hole while searching for our gear). Perhaps in another game, losing your tools or falling in a ditch would be frustrating. Not so here. While movement can be finicky at times, and you will briefly get stuck in spots, Big Walk often felt even more impactful when things were going very, very wrong.

We spent plenty of time doing Big Walk's actual puzzles, which are scattered around the map and usually embedded in big, brightly colored structures: a green horror movie house, an orange colosseum, a blue sound stage. Some of them are relatively easy, like throwing an orb into a basketball hoop multiple times, or playing a game of telephone to identify a specific sequence of shapes or buttons to push. But there are mechanical challenges as well, ones that require platforming and precise movement or throws. There's an entertaining puzzle that requires one person to put on a blindfold (which is actually a big, weird gold head that blocks their view) and navigate through an obstacle course. The others then have to yell instructions at them about where to go and what to do; the scariest part of this was figuring out how to time a jump over a gap. These challenges don't necessarily get progressively harder, because you're free to do whichever puzzle in whatever order you discover them. Some are certainly difficult, but never cruelly so. Big Walk always gives you the tools you need to solve them, so there's no danger of a dramatic learning curve.

One particularly inventive puzzle had my friend Chris locked in a soundproof room trying to relay little musical jingles to us so we could match that to stereos playing the corresponding melodies. Another forced us to split up onto three platforms that were pretty far away from each other and correctly time a synchronized button push. There are a couple puzzles with similar ideas, and the problem was often that we only had two walkie-talkies amongst us. So, we used our laser pointer to signify a countdown or our arms to send a silent message. Little by little, we created a sort of body language cipher to help solve matching puzzles and timing-based challenges alike, and it was a thrill to naturally develop our own system of visual cues.

Each of these puzzles rewards us with another red bean we have to take care of as we bring it back to a bean tower for deposit. Once you've found enough beans for a given tower, you get a special key to unlock something new and helpful: stuff you otherwise couldn't figure out how to operate, like a stalled train or an island-spanning chair lift. And in this progression, Big Walk further embeds the ethos that these discoveries are yours to make.

Big Walk's puzzles are always sharp, and always fun. The use of proximity chat makes the process of solving them feel special in a way I haven’t experienced in a game for a long time. Despite the recent wave of co-op games with an emphasis on hanging out with your friends, it feels so new to play in this particular way, as if we were all physically in this virtual space together. Video games often make us feel like superheroes, like the world revolves around our individual characters. In Big Walk, relationships and language are that superpower. The world doesn't revolve around me, but us.

So much of Big Walk's fun is found in the spaces between the puzzles, too. One of my favorite moments was this time Riley and I wandered away from Chris to go gallivanting in nature without care. This would not have been a big deal… if Riley and I did not have both walkie-talkies. Notoriously bad at navigating, we got wildly lost, even more so after we tumbled down the mountains once again. We were lost for nearly an hour, maybe longer. We went to the train to honk its horn. We tried to follow the coastline, then the train line itself, to make our way back to the place where we first realized we'd lost Chris. Then, a flare shot up in the distance. We walked toward the sound and eventually the direction of the green hue the blast gave off. That's where we found him, at a bean puzzle, firing off flares. Eventually, we sent Chris off to follow the curve of the flare and the bean was waiting at the end of it, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Riley and I certainly couldn't have been trusted to go find it.

I spent a lot of time playing Big Walk over the last week, but I also spent a lot of time thinking about it, and talking about it with the folks I played with. I'm thinking a lot about names, and the power they hold. In the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that names are how we, as humans, build relationships with each other and "the living world." She muses on what it might be like to not know the names of things around you. Kimmerer writes, "I think it would be a little scary and disorienting – like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs." Big Walk's opening feels a little bit like that. Its island is not yet a place with which we've built a relationship, or developed a language. The moment you understand this, Big Walk changes. And what a special thing it is to name this world with friends.

The Last House debuts on Netflix on August 7.

A chamber piece with no consistency, Louis Leterrier’s The Last House plays tonal hopscotch with reckless abandon. Following a family of four who find themselves suddenly trapped indoors, the movie jumps not just between scenes but entire genres, with a head-spinning edit that makes things move at a million miles an hour while, paradoxically, very little actually happens.

Assisted by voiceover befitting children’s folklore, the story opens with Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura) fishing off the coast of Seattle. Rain bears down as the seemingly glum patriarch laments his sparse catch before heading back to his sprawling suburban home. However, any potential drama offered by Jason’s mood (or environmental commentary, by his spoken lines to no one in particular) is quickly brushed aside when he returns to what seems like a happy marriage to Riley (Greta Lee), with whom he has two kids: an elder son, Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and a younger daughter, Ruth (Riley Chung).

The strange premise rears its head before long as the family suddenly finds that their doors and windows won’t open and their neighbors are in a similar jam. The details are best discovered while watching The Last House — they involve a sudden downpour and mysterious shapes fluttering in the distance — but the film features no sense of buildup or gradual discovery. Perhaps to move things along, the family’s very first assumption is some supernatural occurrence or lurking evil, though this is just one of many instances where they behave more like plot delivery mechanisms than actual human beings.

The days turn into weeks as the Delgados learn more about their conundrum. The movie begins to resemble something born from COVID lockdowns, then adopts the hues of a survivalist thriller before eventually zig-zagging into something else entirely. However, few dramatic beats are allowed to breathe along the way, making this metamorphosis feel especially awkward. Despite its nearly two-hour runtime (which seems endless on occasion), The Last House feels cut within an inch of its life, moving suddenly and jaggedly between conversations and events.

More time goes by than you’d expect, which the evolving production design of the family’s home helps track. However, you might not feel these changes intuitively based on how anyone behaves. Moura and Lee are two of their generation’s finest actors, but The Last House turns them into cheap sideshows who burst with anger and melodrama practically at random. It’s a perfect example of how to build bad performances from presumably serviceable footage; both Jason and Riley go from passive to hysterical at the drop of a hat. It’s grating to watch, even before the movie swings in its umpteenth different direction, widening to include Lovecraftian concepts without the requisite, eerie atmosphere.

There’s some heavy-handed moralizing about humanity’s place in this world, but it ends up taking the form of either clunky narration or ethical dilemmas spun from thin air via flashbacks to scenes shown just minutes prior. Leterrier has never been the most interesting storyteller — The Incredible Hulk and Clash of the Titans are hardly vulgar auteur classics — but his previous works have at least held together as coherent mainstream fare. Whether he’s to blame, or it’s the powers that be at Netflix, The Last House feels cobbled together from disparate footage and ideas, resulting in hastily-changing story modes and emotions you can barely track. The individual images all look right, but when strung together, everything feels wrong.

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend.”

Ortegas and Scotty (Melissa Navia and Martin Quinn, respectively) get the spotlight this week, as their long-simmering (well, two-episode long) dislike for one another comes to a head in an attempt at a comedy episode that’s not necessarily funny, but is at least kind of fun at times thanks to game performances from some of the cast.

With the crew burning the warp core intermix chamber at both ends lately, and a key peace negotiation pending, Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and First Officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) decide Alpha Shift needs a vacation. So a quick trip is planned to a resort planet where the unique atmosphere causes a type of inebriation for all who land there… and, of course, a lot of silliness too.

Look, Star Trek has been doing comedy episodes practically since the very beginning, and sometimes quite well, but there’s a trick to it. You can’t really make fun of your characters or break the logic of how they fit into the Star Trek world, and I’m afraid that “Human Best Friend” skirts dangerously close to both of those no-nos on occasion.

Again, it’s a fine line. When a sober Ortegas and not-so-sober Scotty visit an apparently wasted Spock (Ethan Peck), he’s still very Spock-like. “I apologize for the mess,” he says as he adjusts a chess piece’s placement on the board by about one centimeter. It’s subtle and one of the funniest moments in all of “Human Best Friend,” but later, when the pair visit Pike as he’s getting a tattoo, it feels like the entire Strange New Worlds universe is cracking around us thanks to Mount’s over-the-top take on an inebriated Pike. It’s like seeing your boss drunk at the office holiday party, or even worse… your dad at a family gathering! Get it together, man.

Yes, I understand that Christopher Pike is capable of getting drunk (or whatever we’re calling this state), and yes, I also understand that he deserves some R&R like anyone else does. I also recognize that Mount is doing a swell job with the performance. But for the captain of the Enterprise to allow himself to be seen in such a state by his crew… I’m sorry. Maybe I’ve just spent too much time with Captain Picard in my life, but that sort of cheap gag breaks the show.

So each character gets their own bit to play: Workaholic Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), so unwilling to relax, becomes the ultimate relaxer and relaxation host; Una sings Klingon karaoke power ballads; Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) does his best Cocktail impression; La’an (Christina Chong) is in commando mode (again); Chapel (Jess Bush) becomes a win-or-die Bingo player; and so on. Some of these bits are cute, some are a bit eye-rolley, but none really pop.

If the episode works at all, it’s because of Navia and Quinn, who have good chemistry and whose characters actually get to grow a bit through these shenanigans, as they’re forced to work together first to deliver a letter to the captain (“A piece of paper!?” says an amazed Scotty) and then to find their missing shuttle. That the two realize they’ve likely been butting heads because they’re, as Scotty puts it, “not so different after all,” is a nice enough thread for “Human Best Friend,” and sweetly played.

But again, the logic of the episode is flawed. By the time Pike and the crew are trying to fake their way through the negotiations back on the ship while still drunk – negotiations involving a civil war, mind you – it’s pretty clear that Alpha Shift really shoulda called in Beta Shift not just for the negotiations, but for the episode itself.

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• Dave Foley is mostly wasted as one of those annoying Star Trek alien salesmen types, but he does get a line or two that are worth a chuckle.
• “It’s green.” Now we know where Scotty picked that one up!
• I guess Ortegas keeps the gaffer tape handy.
• Why waste a mugato costume when you’ve got one laying around?
• We don’t usually hear about duty shifts (Alpha, etc.) on Starfleet ships. No doubt Captain Jellico would be pleased by all the mentions here (while simultaneously disappointed that it’s only a three-shift rotation).
• The animated sequence in the planet’s advertisement is cute, but did you notice the woman wearing the same outfit that Andrea has on in TOS’ “What Are Little Girls Made of?”
• So now we know that Scotty has six brothers. And this doesn’t include the at least one sister he has, who will one day have a son – the ill-fated Peter Preston from Wrath of Khan.
• Bring back cookies!

While we didn’t get pre-release access to the full version of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, I did play many hours of online matches during its recent open beta, and can already confidently say that its fighting is a lot of fun. ArcSystem Works’ latest is a very mechanics-driven game that’s not always the most intuitive, so it took me some time to find my footing – but once I did, I got sucked right in. Its gorgeous action, its fantastic roster of characters, and especially its unique take on tag fighting allow for some flexibility in how many characters you actually need to learn to be competitive. I need to spend some more time in the arena and check out all the trimmings before my final review but Tokon seems primed to live up to the legacy of Marvel fighting games.

Let’s start with the fundamentals: Tokon is a 4v4 tag fighter with a bunch of unique rules that attempt to control the inherent chaos of having eight swappable characters in a single match. For example, all characters on a team share the same lifebar, removing one of the core elements of traditional tag fighting games, which typically let you swap in a fresh fighter and let the damaged one restore health while they sit on the sidelines. It’s a smart adjustment that allows for a much cleaner UI, avoids the pitfall of 4v4 matches that would otherwise run too long, and removes one of the big barriers of entry to any traditional tag fighter: the need to learn multiple characters in order to have a competitive team.

But what’s especially cool is that while you can be a very strong player by knowing how to play just one character, there’s still a ton of value in crafting a well-synergized team and swapping between them. For instance, if you know that your main struggles in a particular match up, like maybe your opponent plays Magneto and you would have trouble against his strong zoning, you could have a better option waiting in the wings. Or maybe you have a character that you really like but have trouble opening opponents up with, like in my case, Blade – you could lead with a more mix-up-heavy character, and once you land the hit, swap to continue the combo and get more damage than the mix-up character might have been able to get on their own.

What I really love about this system is that you can add new elements to your gameplan piece-by-piece rather than feeling like you need to have everything on lock right from the start. When I first started playing, all I needed to do was get competent with Spider-Man. I learned some high/low mix-up options, some bread and butter combos, got a basic understanding of how to use his web-zip to maneuver around the screen, and I felt ready to start playing against other people online. When I started to feel like I hit the ceiling of what I could do with just Spider-Man, I went back into training mode to learn more about Blade, and was able to add new layers to my gameplan. This process of being able to start with a small foundation and build upon it is the ideal way to learn a fighting game, and Tokon feels designed specifically for it.

Where things start to get a little strange is when you add assists into the mix. You see, Tokon doesn’t begin as a 4v4 fighter. Instead, every match starts with just two of the characters on each team available, with the remaining fighters needing to be unlocked by either landing a light auto-combo, hitting the opponent with a move near the corner that causes a stage transition or wallsplat, connecting with a throw, or losing a round. Unlocking these characters is important, because each one adds another bar to your Assemble meter, which governs the ability to call assists during specific moments.

Tokon has a lot of hyper specific rules surrounding its assists, which leads to a system that can be fairly overwhelming for newcomers – it was certainly a lot to take in for me, even as someone who’s played lots of tag fighters like Marvel vs Capcom, Dragon Ball FighterZ, 2XKO, and many more. Before a match begins, you place your four characters into various positions: Leader, Shooter, Vertical, and Assault. These placements determine what kind of assist is used when you call them out in neutral (meaning when you’re just standing still or walking without pressing a button or blocking). Leader is whoever the current point character is, Shooters will use a projectile, Verticals predictably cover a vertical hit box, and the Assault spot is generally reserved for each character’s most powerful assist.

These neutral assists don’t cost any meter, but if you try to call an assist after landing an attack to pick up a combo or to cover your recovery after a blocked move, you’ll instead get a universal dash-attack assist that costs one bar of the Assemble meter. What’s finicky about this system is that you have to be very precise with your assist call, because if it happens too early (or too late) the assist won’t come out. This extends to the active tag system, which allows you to switch control to your assist character for a brief period while they’re on the screen. It’s very similar to 2XKO, but here it feels much more restrained. In 2XKO, you can basically swap to the assist character at any point, enabling some really tricky mix-up opportunities. Tokon, on the other hand, seems to be much more hesitant to allow these kinds of unrestrained mix-ups. While that’s understandable considering how crazy it could be with three assist characters, it does lead to an active tag system that feels awkward, unintuitive, and less fun on the offensive side of things.

However, the nerfed strength of active tag in no way means that Tokon doesn’t have depth or flair. Every character oozes style; Spidey is able to zip all across the stage, baiting anti-airs by hanging and then jumping off his webs; Storm can manipulate the weather to push and pull objects and enemies (or even snatch her opponent in a command grab from half-a-screen away with a gust of wind that pushes her forward); Magneto fills the screen with literal metallic garbage that he can utilize as a weapon. We’re no stranger to seeing a lot of these characters in fighting games before, but ArcSystem Works has gone above and beyond in terms of making them feel authentic to their comic book counterparts, while also ensuring they are each a blast to play in their own particular way.

There’s still a ton left to cover, from the story mode that promises a 10+ hour original story that follows the various teams that make up Tokon’s roster, to the teaching and training tools, to the gigantic online lobby that I only briefly got a glimpse of. I also plan to test the PC performance on live servers thoroughly given the issues that plagued the platform during the most recent open beta. Check back for all of that and more in my full review early next week.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit

This is a spoiler-free review of all eight episodes of Star Wars: Visions Presents - The Ninth Jedi. The entire series is live now on Disney+ and Hulu.

The Star Wars franchise is definitely in a bit of a slump lately. The Sequel Trilogy ended poorly, and Lucasfilm is still in the process of figuring out how to move forward in that era. Meanwhile, the mediocre performance of The Mandalorian and Grogu shows that even that once dependable pillar of the franchise is hemorrhaging support. But one thing fans can generally count on is that Star Wars will always deliver when it comes to new animated projects. Star Wars: Visions Presents - The Ninth Jedi does nothing to change that fact.

As the title implies, The Ninth Jedi is a spinoff of the two short films included in Seasons 1 and 3 of the Star Wars: Visions anthology series. As such, it's best to watch those first and get a feel for this futuristic setting and cast of characters before diving into the new series. Building on those shorts, this new series follows up-and-coming Jedi Lah Kara (Chinatsu Akasaki/Kimiko Glenn) and her allies as they search for Kara's father, Lah Zhima (Shin-ichiro Miki/Simu Liu), and battle the tyrannical Nawaam (Nao Omori/Young Mazino).

The core appeal of The Ninth Jedi is and always has been the blank canvas it offers. Many argue the best thing Lucasfilm can do for the franchise in its currently troubled state is to carve out a new storytelling era completely free of the baggage that is the Skywalker Saga. Well, that's precisely what you get with The Ninth Jedi. The series is set centuries after the films, establishing a completely new blank canvas on which to paint.

Mind you, the picture it paints isn't always that dramatically different from what's come before. Despite the massive time jump, this is a series that deals in a lot of familiar elements. You have the wide-eyed neophyte Jedi coming of age under the watchful eyes of a grizzled Jedi Master. You have a galaxy plagued by war after the Jedi have been all but wiped out. You have an evil empire that trades in planet-destroying super-weapons and is ruled by a foreboding, lightsaber-wielding villain in black armor.

The Ninth Jedi walks a fine line between celebrating the tropes of the franchise and becoming bogged down by them. Early on, the series tends to fall on the wrong side of that divide. It gets off to a fairly sluggish start in the early episodes, which tend to highlight just how little has really changed in this galaxy after all this time. If you took umbrage with the Sequels and the idea that the ending of Return of the Jedi wasn't a permanent victory over evil but merely a temporary reprieve in a neverending conflict, you may have a similarly hard time swallowing what this series has to offer.

But, eventually, The Ninth Jedi does find its groove, and with it, opportunities to take advantage of this wide-open new era. The show builds steam as it pivots away from simply focusing on the ragtag rebels fighting the evil empire and more into the motivations of figures like Zhima and Nawaam. With time, they become more than simply recycled archetypes, but fascinating characters with their own, unique views on the Force and the dichotomy between Light and Dark. Kara herself develops into a compelling protagonist whose journey doesn't simply mirror that of Luke and Rey Skywalker. One caveat, though - definitely watch the show in subtitled Japanese language form, as the English dubbed voices are mostly flat and bland by comparison.

Technically, The Ninth Jedi is a non-canon series (not that this distinction matters much when the setting is so far removed from the rest of the franchise). Regardless, it manages to hit on and develop some of the same ideas and themes that have been slowly percolating in other contemporary Star Wars projects. There's the notion of democratizing the Force. Here, being a Jedi is less a question of innate ability than courage and a willingness to fight in defense of others. There's also the concept of lightsaber blades changing colors and serving as a window into the wielder's psychology and moral compass.

Most interestingly, The Ninth Jedi dabbles with the concept of Gray Jedi in a more direct way than we've seen anywhere else in the Disney Star Wars era. In that sense, the lack of canonicity may actually be a boon, because it gives the writers and animators room to dig into an idea that the Lucasfilm Story Group still seems hesitant to embrace. This series is very interested in exploring that struggle to achieve a state of enlightenment beyond good or evil. There's power in embracing both the Light Side and Dark Side together. But is that the true endgame for a Force user? Is pure detachment a desirable state, or must it be tempered with compassion? All of these questions are explored over the course of the season. For a show that initially starts out on such familiar turf, it's satisfying to discover that The Ninth Jedi has so much on its mind.

And even when the show is at its most predictable, it does have the benefit of not looking like any of Lucasfilm's more traditional Star Wars projects. The Ninth Jedi is once again animated by Production I.G, and they bring a very distinct look and feel to the franchise. The ships and droids are very different. The general vibe is more purely fantasy-oriented. Heck, there's an entire group of characters that are basically Tolkien-style dwarf space miners. Compare this to something like the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic, where many of the character and ship designs feel right out of the movies despite the game being set thousands of years beforehand. This fresh take is greatly appreciated.

It's also worth pointing out how much the score adds to the whole endeavor. Composers Nobuko Toda & Kazuma Jinnouchi manage to capture the majesty and scope of the classic John Williams music without actually recycling any of Williams' leitmotifs. The music is both fresh and unique and deeply Star Wars-y, which is ultimately a solid metaphor for the show as a whole.

Ted Lasso Season 4 debuts August 5 on Apple TV.

Three years after a Season 3 finale that sure did feel like a series finale at the time, Ted Lasso is back for a fourth season after all. In the modern streaming world, it’s become far too typical for a three-year gap between seasons to become something of a norm. At least Ted Lasso is accounting for this prolonged break in a bigger way, with a semi-reboot approach that feels more akin to a show being revived 10-15 years later rather than one we last saw the same year Oppenheimer was in movie theaters.

The third season ended with Ted (Jason Sudeikis) returning home to America and realizing it was time to stop being the semi-deadbeat dad he’d become, given his young son was back in Kansas City while Ted had been overseas coaching AFC Richmond. Season 4’s premiere is notable, because it’s actually entirely set in Kansas City. Ted is surprised when Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Leslie (Jeremy Swift), and Keeley (Juno Temple) show up on his doorstep, hoping to recruit him to return to London to coach the new AFC Richmond women’s division team.

The premiere was shot on location in Kansas City, giving it a markedly different visual landscape than your typical Ted Lasso episode, and it makes the most of it. And there’s plenty of comic mileage drawn from making Rebecca, Leslie, and Keeley the fish out of water for once, as they take in these new sights and sounds. The cast all slip very comfortably back into their characters, whether it be the sweet and funny sisterly connection Waddingham and Temple exude, or the lovably dorky demeanor of Swift’s Leslie.

As for the title character, series co-creator and EP Sudeikis still wears the smile and stache of Ted like he was born for it. Ted’s gotten through the mental health issues that plagued him early on, but we find him at a restless point of his life, working as an assistant manager at a supermarket. He’s still maintaining his usual sunny disposition, but clearly without a true sense of fulfillment. Of course, there’s not a lot of dramatic tension as to whether he’ll accept the offer to coach again — there’s a whole season’s worth of episodes to fill, and we’ve seen the trailers — but the premiere does a solid job of showing how Ted gets to the point where he can admit that’s what he wants to do.

Pushing things on the credibility side though is how the premiere deals with the fact that Ted not only wouldn’t want to leave his son Henry (now played by Grant Feely) again, but wouldn’t want to ask to separate Henry from his mother, Ted’s ex-wife Michelle (Andrea Anders). The solution feels far too easy and convenient, awkwardly handwaving what would likely be a very difficult conversation in real life.

Given the nature of the premiere and how focused it is — no other series regulars appear beyond the four mentioned above, and we never actually see London — it’s hard to be sure how much it will reflect the remainder of the season. But the approach it takes is promising as far as its willingness to lock in on just a few characters and interconnected situations.

While Ted Lasso never lost its kindhearted center, Season 3 was notably overindulgent and often felt lacking in form after EP/co-creator Bill Lawrence stepped back as showrunner. This was demonstrated by its incredibly overlong episode runtimes, which frequently hit a full hour or more in the midst of a show that began with half-hour installments. The amount of subplots and side stories got out of control to the point that we somehow were following the inner workings of two different restaurants at one point on a series that was meant to be about a soccer team.

As we prep to meet AFC Richmond's women's team, it’s definitely going to be odd adjusting to saying goodbye to the entire team we’ve spent the last three seasons invested in, and I do worry that it will feel even more difficult to move on thanks to the show still being set in the same location as before with most of the same support staff in place. It likely would have been an easier transition to send Ted and a few key players to an all new part of the world for a cleaner break from what came before, but even as we prep for these big changes, the premiere does give hope that Sudeikis and new co-showrunner Jack Burditt have learned that less can be more. Ted Lasso needed to feel more reined in again… albeit with a 47-minute runtime. Hey, that’s still short by Season 3’s standards! And while we have yet to meet the new team, the prospect of returning to the Season 1 feel of Ted and his team getting to know each other and once more starting from a true underdog perspective is a welcome one.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for X-Men '97 Season 2, Episode 8!

I have to wonder if it was the smartest idea for the X-Men '97 crew to telegraph the resurrection of Gambit (A.J. LoCascio). At the time, that stinger scene was a great way to cap off Season 1 and tease what was to come. But now that we've finally arrived at Season 2, is having that knowledge working against the show as it actually brings Gambit back into play? All I can say for sure is that something is missing in Episode 8. Gambit's resurrection doesn't pack quite the emotional punch his death did back in 2024.

Maybe part of the problem is that we don't get a great sense of what Apocalypse's (Ross Marquand) larger goals are here. The obvious assumption was that he was assembling his latest and greatest team of Horsemen with which to dominate the world, and Gambit was his Death. But there's no indication that En Sabah Nur has been gathering other minions. He simply revived Gambit and then turned into a desiccated monkey corpse for some reason. I suppose we're meant to assume his spirit now resides within Gambit? Whatever the case, now back among the living, that simply leaves Gambit to assemble his old posse of thieves and assassins and do... whatever it is Apocalypse wanted him to do.

Part of that seems to involve punishing Candra, the X-Ternal to whom the two guilds have been paying their tithes for all these years. In what is easily the most disappointing element of Episode 8, we learn that Apocalypse and Candra were former lovers, and the latter stole a piece of his power before forsaking him. That all of this backstory is conveyed through a brief, matter-of-fact flashback sequence does this episode no favors at all. The Apocalypse/Candra dynamic needed to be a lot more fleshed out than it is, particularly with the previous foreshadowing in Episode 4.

Not to mention that, if the series really wants to dig into the concept of Apocalypse having a long-lost lover, the character Genesis holds far more storytelling potential. We can only hope this show sticks around long enough to tackle a proper House of X/Krakoa adaptation.

None of this is to say that Episode 8 doesn't sink its emotional hooks at times. While the long-awaited reunion between Rogue (Lenore Zann) and Gambit isn't quite what I hoped for, the two characters do have some strong scenes together. Rogue's opening nightmare is a strong start to the episode, and her entrance into Gambit and Xavier's (Marquand) psychic battle also stands out as one of the better moments of the episode. But again, too often throughout "Dead Man's Hand," I was left with the feeling that something is missing.

It's telling that I wound up finding more weight in the Summers family drama than Gambit's return. Episode 8 makes the most of the fleeting alliance between the X-Men and Cable's (Chris Potter) team, along with all the awkwardness that comes from father and mother being reunited with their now much older son. That plays right into Cable's more ruthless nature and his struggle to still be the man his parents (briefly) raised him to be. The Summers family tree is so stupid and so convoluted, but somehow this series makes us care about all of it.

It's also fun seeing the X-Men fully reunited after spending nearly all the season split into different camps. There's a small part of my fanboy brain that dislikes seeing the team simultaneously decked out in a mixture of classic '80s costumes and more modern New X-Men suits, but I'll allow it. In what is definitely the highlight of Episode 8, we see the combined might of the X-Men and X-Force take on Gambit's forces, only to get absolutely wrecked by Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough). It's a blast seeing what happens when this normally benevolent hero finally cuts loose.

"Dead Man's Hand" certainly has its moments, but this episode doesn't come together as well as I would've liked. And that's a little worrisome now that we only have one chapter left in Season 2. The show has an awful lot of ground to cover in terms of reestablishing Apocalypse in the present and orchestrating this final showdown between rival mutant teams. As strong as Season 2 has generally been, it would be a huge shame for it to collapse at the finish line.

The Motorola Razr Fold takes the Razr family to a new dimension. While earlier foldables from Motorola followed in the footsteps of the original Razr, offering a flip-phone style footprint, the Razr Fold opts for a hotdog fold, akin to what Samsung has offered from its Galaxy Z Fold lineup. Motorola hasn’t taken generations of iterations on this design to get to a very solid point, though. The Razr Fold is impressively thin and looks like all the experience gained from the earlier Razr foldables is paying off big. At $1,899, it’s not a cheap option, but it may still have what it takes to earn your money or at least due consideration.

Motorola Razr Fold – Design and Features

As mentioned, the Razr Fold opens like a book rather than an old school flip phone. Where Samsung’s early folders were normal-size while open and double the thickness of a typical smartphone while closed, the Razr Fold has jumped straight to ultra-thin dimensions.

Closed up, it looks almost like any other smartphone, and it’s a pretty one with a textured, rubberized back. It’s a little thicker than most, and the camera bump adds quite a bit of depth (that’ll prove worthwhile), but it doesn’t feel unusually large. Unfolded, it becomes impressively thin at 0.19 inches to edge out even the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge or iPhone Air – camera bumps aside. The hints that it’s a foldable are the asymmetry and the seem running around the perimeter of the phone. It is a bit on the heavy side at 8.6 ounces, but that’s not so crazy next to the 8 ounce iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Folded shut, the 21:9 exterior display is a large 6.6-inch, 1080x2520 panel, and it opens up to reveal an even larger, nearly square 8.1-inch, 2232x2484 internal display. Both screens are sharp and bright LTPO pOLED displays with the internal reaching 120Hz and the external hitting 165Hz. For ultra-wide cinema, the external display will probably be the one to go with, and then it won’t really stand out from the crowd of bigger flagship phone displays. But for the wealth of 16:9 content out there (or even squarer formats like 4:3 or The Snyder Cut), the internal display can provide a larger surface for viewing than the competition. That inner seam where the phone folds remains a minor nuisance. It shows glare readily, and it’s all the more apparent when displaying dark content or viewed at an off angle. You can also easily feel it when swiping across. That said, when the screen is lit up and you face it head-on, the seam mostly vanishes.

Either way, both screens can look gorgeous in the right conditions, and even though they love to show finger oils and glare on the interior folding seam is apparent, they push out enough brightness to easily get past that glare. You won’t want to treat the two displays the same, though. The exterior has Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3 that should withstand drops and scrapes a lot better than the internal display’s Ultra Thin Glass.

While you’ll want to be gentle with the phone, it’s still tougher than early foldables. It has an IP49 rating to keep a good deal of dust and debris out (just don’t fold it closed with a bunch of crud inside. It can also withstand submersion in freshwater and water jets.

It’s truly a shame we as a body of consumers let smartphone makers get away with killing the microSD card slot, because the Razr Fold likely could have had one. The SIM try in the phone is extra long, with easily enough space to accommodate two SIMs or a SIM and a microSD card, yet it only holds one SIM card. I might have accepted space constraints as an excuse if the SIM tray didn’t just have dead space built in.

Motorola includes facial recognition for sign-in. It also has a fingerprint scanner built into the power button, which makes it conveniently accessible whether using the phone folded open or closed.

Motorola has a bonus for creatives and handwriting enthusiasts. The Razr Fold supports a pressure-sensitive active stylus, and it worked quite well in my brief testing with it. I’d be careful about pushing too hard on the internal display, though. It’s also an optional accessory (i.e., even more money out of your pocket), and it doesn’t attach to the phone or charge from it either. It has its own separate charging sleeve that it inserts into for storage and recharging.

The speakers on the Razr Fold are decent, offering loud stereo sound that’s a decent match for the display.

Motorola has fitted a 5Gbps USB-C port with DisplayPort 1.2 output, letting the Razr Fold connect to an external display and work as something of a portable computer.

Motorola Razr Fold – Software

The Razr Fold is pricey, so it’s good to see that Motorola isn’t holding back on long-term support. The company is promising seven years of Android OS and security updates, which helps keep it competitive with Samsung and Google on those fronts.

The software itself is a tame implementation of Android. The phone came running Android 16, and it’s not heavy handed about AI features or bloated with unwanted software, though there is a button dedicated to recording notes, making images and quickly tapping into other AI features. The OS is fairly flexible with customization as well. I found the default quick setting buttons a little large, but the OS let me shrink some of them down. I could also go from a 4x6 home screen app grid to a 5x7 to get more apps just a tap away.

Motorola Razr Fold – Gaming and Performance

The Razr Fold doesn’t feature Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line chip, but it comes close with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, which gets 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage. This is a chip I saw in the OnePlus 15R, which mustered solid performance, and though the Razr Fold is wielding this chip in a much thinner chassis, it nearly keeps up. It’s not quite up to iPhone 17 or OnePlus 15 speeds, but it’s no slouch. The sustain is also impressive.

The phone performed surprisingly well for how thin it is. I played over a half hour of Neverness to Everness with the graphics settings at their max cinematic level, and though there was the occasional stutter, the game generally ran smoothly at 60FPS. At the end of my session, the phone wasn't even noticeably warm. It even managed 70% consistency in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light stress test.

The Razr Fold’s performance is enough to rival the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and even the new Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra despite the latter’s more advanced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. In my colleague Jackie’s review, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra could struggle under sustained loads. It started the Steel Nomad Light stress test with a high score of 1641 and sank down to 1,296 by the end of the 20-run gauntlet. That may have been more stable technically, but the Razr Fold started out higher at 2289 and finished with a low of 1600 points. It had also settled into a groove after 5 runs, so it seemed unlikely to ever sink as low as Samsung’s fold in the test.

The fact that Jackie found the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra uncomfortably warm to the touch after gaming while the Razr Fold was chilling puts the Razr in a great position to be the better gaming device.

The phone has a sizable 6,000mAh battery despite its thinness, and it’s even willing to take some pretty fast charging. It can juice back up at 80W from a wired connection of 50W from a wireless one. Sadly, even with some magnetism going on at the back of the phone, it doesn’t support Qi2. While battery life can vary dramatically from person to person, I was easily able to get through the day even while squeezing in some time gaming on the big screen.

Motorola Razr Fold – Cameras

Motorola didn’t skimp on the cameras included in the Razr Fold. It decked out the rear with a triple-sensor setup to rival Samsung, OnePlus, and Google, and it even has a couple of sharp selfie shooters. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s on deck:

• 50MP wide, f/1.6, 2.44-micron, 1/1.28”, OIS
• 50MP ultrawide, f/2.0, 1.28-micron, 1/2.76”
• 50MP telephoto, 3x optical zoom, f/2.4, 1.6-micron, 1/1.95, OIS
• 20MP exterior selfie, f/2.4, 1.22-micron, 90-degree FOV
• 32MP interior selfie, f/2.4, 1.28-micron, 88.5-degree FOV

I can’t say that the camera system is faultless, as it occasionally exhibits some oversharpening on the telephoto sensor, and it can get a bit soft and noisy in dimmer settings, but beyond those fairly common faults, it is excellent.

The cameras blend together well, matching one another’s color and dynamic range for a great consistency between shots. The sensors capture vivid color, bringing life to nature shots and street scenes alike. The cameras also snap sharp photos for loads of detail even when zooming in on them a bit. It’s just a bonus that the internal display’s squarer aspect ratio is all the better for previewing and reviewing the 3:2 photos that cameras will take.

The zoom is actually exceedingly strong. Though it has just a 3x optical, the 50MP sensor is happy to keep cropping in a bit further, and it has some impressive results. I could snap photos of details well beyond what I could see with my own eyes.

The sensors also do a great job handling macro shots, letting me get much closer to small subjects than I’m used to. The selfie sensors are no slouches either, snapping crisp photos with natural exposure. All of this combines to make the Razr Fold a rather excellent all around shooter for big and small subjects near and far.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra may have added in some higher-end cameras for this generation, but it will likely have its work cut out for it beating the Razr Fold. Motorola included a bigger, higher-res telephoto sensor than the Z Fold 8 Ultra’s 10 megapixels, and the main sensor here may be lower resolution, but it’s offering a slightly wider aperture, bigger sensor, and bigger pixels.

Ice Cream Man will be released in theaters on August 7.

Eli Roth is no stranger to violence. Over the course of his career, from directing unrelentingly gruesome films like Hostel and the darkly fun yet forgettable recent Thanksgiving to playing a brief yet memorable part in Inglorious Basterds, he’s made blood and viscera the materials with which he paints. Sometimes, this has yielded results you can’t help but be begrudgingly captivated by, where the more the blood runs, the more you can’t bring yourself to look away. Still, in many other cases (looking at you, Cabin Fever and The Green Inferno), it’s felt like Roth was shamelessly lifting ideas from older, far better movies without adding anything new. Rather than feeling like homage, they’re closer to poor imitation. Instead of being remotely horrifying, the scariest thing about a growing number of Roth’s films — when they aren’t outright disasters like the baffling Borderlands — is how derivative they are.

Such is the case with Ice Cream Man, Roth’s first film directed under his company, The Horror Section. Not to be confused with the 1995 horror movie of the same name starring Clint Howard, this is a film about the dangers of consuming too much ice cream that itself feels like it’s gobbled up too many past horror films and puked them out. However, what’s strange this time around is how his latest is not just indebted to horror of the distant past, but recent genre hits like the Terrifier series and Zach Cregger’s Weapons. It’s once more not nearly as good as either of those, lacking the chaotic madness of Art the Clown in its killer and the more haunting yet humorous patience with which Cregger approached his stellar horror film. Instead, it’s just a sporadic smashing together of both of them, bringing together murderous kids trapped in a trance of some kind, and a silent though far less entertainingly expressive killer pulling their strings. The primary difference? The reason for the kids becoming murderous involves eating ice cream.

Credit where credit is due: This is not the worst premise on paper, and even sounds like it could be the start of a more campy, cheeky horror romp. Unfortunately, Roth never makes the most of this potential, resulting in a film that’s really cheap and less than clever. This cheapness extends both to the way it all looks as well as the way it’s constructed. From the opening moments surrounding a baseball game that will soon be the last any in this town ever play, it feels like you’re watching a YouTube sketch rather than an immersive horror film. There isn’t any richness or texture to the images, most of the scenes are bizarrely overlit, and lines of dialogue feel painfully cringeworthy in a way that only seems half intentional. The more that it goes on, the more the whole thing proves inescapably awkward and stiff rather than playfully unhinged. Even when a character later gets their cranium removed so that their brain can be scooped out and fed back to them, it elicits little more than a shrug. It’s a movie that inflicts plenty of head trauma but ultimately reveals itself as having no real brains of its own.

At the core of it all is young Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who — despite being lactose intolerant — will still be tormented by the titular Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) after he unleashes what is essentially a curse on the otherwise peaceful Bayleen Bay. There’s a vaguely Stephen King-esque feel to the town, but we quickly realize how limited in scope it all is. Rather than feel like a real place populated by memorable characters or with interesting environments for the horror to play out in, it’s all rather unimaginative and just about getting to the next burst of violence, which often does prove genuinely gruesome. Parents are murdered in their beds by their children, the school becomes a site of bloody violence, and the town is revealed as having a darker side that the community has (futilely) tried to keep hidden. Some of this is sufficiently preposterous, with kills involving microscopes, a ladder, and even a Segway all bringing plenty of blood to the table.

That’s where the film seems to be attempting to be more like Terrifier, but where that movie — for all its flaws and own budgetary limitations — boasted great performances in lead Lauren LaVera and David Howard Thornton as Art himself, as well as a real sense of go-for-broke mania, there’s nothing here that brings the necessary energy to make this ride come alive. Instead, we get Roth himself playing Jared’s father and delivering lines like, “Dare I say, he gives me the chills,” in reference to the Ice Cream Man, which repeatedly fall flat. Were the film more playful throughout, maybe moments like this could work; instead, this line lands awkwardly and is followed by one of the most truly strange dubbed lines you’ll ever hear when Roth’s character turns away. It’s all more amateurish than it is darkly absurd, giving you a “we have Terrifier at home” feeling.

Most disappointingly, when it comes to what this horror film attempts to serve up, there just isn’t that much to chew on. It’s never quite creatively ridiculous enough to go off the rails, and the scenes where we’re spoon-fed mounds of rather unnecessary exposition grind everything to a halt. Where the grim pleasures to be found in Weapons were balanced by a creeping sense of dread, Roth’s Ice Cream Man doesn’t earn either. It occasionally gestures towards playing around with some animated sequences, only for those to fall by the wayside. For all it throws at the wall to see what sticks, the surface stays pretty bare. Despite running less than 90 minutes, you will feel the length; a sudden swerve to dive into the backstory of its killer just results in a dreary drawn-out explanation.

In the end, despite how desperately it attempts to replicate what’s been done better elsewhere, the Ice Cream Man is no Art the Clown or Aunt Gladys, and Roth is no horror auteur. Where Weapons was restrained before ending with a bang, providing a dark cherry on top with one of the most satisfying yet sinister endings of recent memory, this film fails to build in any entertaining way and just leaves you with a sense of emptiness. The only real revelation that you come away with is that you could probably entirely skip this meal, including the dessert that is supposedly so important, and not miss much. You won’t be screaming in either joy or fear, but you will open your mouth to yawn.

Like an above-ground swimming pool, Beast of Reincarnation is one of those things that feels like it should be great in theory, but leaves something to be desired once you actually spend some time in it. On a surface level, everything from the aesthetics and otherworldly apocalyptic setting to the battles against giant, diseased creatures has the makings of something really special. In practice though, this awesome collection of ideas only rarely approaches realizing that potential, as nearly every aspect proves to be quite shallow. Combat against both minion enemies and bosses alike is extremely one-note, the story succeeds much more at collecting tropes than evoking any kind of emotion, and there’s an overreliance on indistinguishable areas and enemies throughout the adventure. There’s still a decent action RPG in here somewhere, because when it occasionally does shine with a neat wrinkle in the story or a particularly cool fight sequence, it’s very easy to see how this could have been every bit as awesome as it looks at first glance, but highlights like those are certainly the exception to an action game that’s largely just okay.

Combining elements of a soulslike with a more traditional JRPG, this fast-paced action game feels like what you might end up with if you tried to combine Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Across the roughly 35-hour campaign, you’ll split your time between exploring levels of ruined buildings reclaimed by wildlife, parrying and dodging in tense combat encounters, and learning about the convoluted backstory of the world and characters that surround your protagonist, Emma. There’s loads of potential in that formula, and in its best moments, Beast of Reincarnation is both beautiful to look at and incredibly badass, as your katana-wielding elemental mage absolutely overloads the screen with over-the-top melee attacks, sending bolts of lightning and fire flying every which way to complement the artful swordsmanship.

That potential is only realized every once in a while though, as you’ll spend a lot of your time fighting the same handful of enemies far too often, plowing through even the most daunting encounters without much friction due to incredibly forgiving parry windows, and quickly mastering every opponent you come across owing to the fact that they all have just two or three attacks they repeat ad nauseum. Conceptually, ninja-dueling your way through this beautiful, destroyed world and its massive monsters should be sick as hell, but it only takes a couple hours for it all to feel quite skin deep, like how in its opening chapter you’re forced to fight the same giant elk boss multiple times, as it assails you with the one attack it seem to know over and over again in a fight that lasts much longer than it should.

There are still plenty of memorable moments sprout up every now and then, like one level where you’re scaling the inside of a creepy, rotating cube machine and fighting against the forgotten experiments left in the creepy structure, but most of your time will be spent in forgettable regions filled with the same robotic baddies, concluding in a boss fight against a creature you’ve already seen (and is in many cases just a larger version of an existing bestial enemy).

One aspect of combat that fares much better is the addition of Koo, your dire wolf companion, who battles alongside you with an arsenal of increasingly destructive magical abilities. Koo mostly does his own thing, but his behaviors and abilities can be customized and upgraded as you go, and it's important to build him up accordingly since he becomes a vital part of getting through some of the larger combat sequences much faster. He can also be controlled directly, as you pause time to select a special ability for him to use Final Fantasy VII Remake-style – you can even command him to assassinate enemies on your behalf, which really helps speed up some of those repetitive combat encounters and can burn through large chunks of a boss’ health bar as well. Plus, Koo is inexplicably one of the strongest characters, despite being a four-legged pooch with no dialogue. His high energy and unusually expressive face serves as a counterweight to the robotic mannerisms of the majority of the bipedal cast.

Despite Koo’s best efforts though, the paper-thin depth of Beast of Reincarnation only grows the longer you play. Exploring the mostly-linear regions is beautiful and features some truly awesome music, but after just two levels I already felt overly familiar with the extremely monotonous checklist of loot to collect and camp sites to unlock before fighting the boss (almost always twice for some reason), then moving on to do it all again. That formula doesn’t evolve as you progress through levels either, as you only ever unlock new abilities to help you power through combat while exploration and platforming never gain any new tricks. Meanwhile, most of the combat pits you against sword-wielding automatons who have maybe one or two different attacks between them, which means you’ll be parrying and countering the same set of telegraphed attacks a dozen times in a single combat encounter.

Even things like the music (which again, is quite good), becomes stale as you quickly discover they’ve got one whole song playing on a loop for more than ten hours worth of levels. Emma, on the other hand, gains access to a bunch of passive abilities that buff her generally, and a bunch of special arts that unlock new moves and attack combos in combat. Most of this stuff does very little to make fighting feel better, as you’re still going up against enemies that just spam the same attacks for you to parry before countering with an attack of your own. They do help those fights go by much quicker, however, and eventually you’ll be able to take out a handful of enemies all at once with some seriously cool-looking attacks.

RPG mechanics don’t fare much better, as the shallow upgrades available for upgrading your katanas, ranged weapons, and accessories are fairly limited. For example, you’ll find new katanas on a regular basis, but even by the end of the story, you won’t come across any that are definitively better or have incentives to support a specific playstyle than those you found early on. So, you have little motivation to upgrade them except to diversify the special effects and status ailments various weapons offer. Skill trees, on the other hand, fare much better as Koo unlocks a whole host of abilities that blast enemies with tons of high-DPS spells and layer on status effects that do things like bind an enemy in place with magical plant vines.

Boss fights are especially disappointing, because they feel like they should be the major draw here, but instead only serve to magnify combat’s shortcomings (quite literally) as you fight a massive beast whose imposing presence is wasted on them being incredibly thoughtless adversaries who often repeat the same slow-moving attack twenty times in row. Bizarrely, you’re usually made to fight these creatures once partway through a level, only to face them again with zero changes at the level’s conclusion, before they transform into an even cooler-looking final phase that…attacks with an almost identical moveset. Worse yet, in the second half of the adventure, it seems to straight up run out of ideas as it starts sending repeat bosses at you. The fact that all of these fights are followed by the same cutscene of your character passing out then waking up in a bed certainly don’t help, making story progress fall into a predictable cadence.

Like any RPG worth its salt, a lot of the focus here is on the story, complete with cutscenes so lengthy you’ll want to remember to flick the joystick every so often to keep your screen lit up. As an emotionless warrior who also has amnesia (because of course you do), you’ll go around hunting down the aforementioned giant, blighted beasts alongside Koo, so you can stop the end of the world. As is the case with lots of things in Beast of Reincarnation, that idea is much stronger than the execution as Emma and the apocalyptic setting that gives rise to such conflict is poised to deliver a tale filled with interesting mysteries to unravel. Instead, Emma and her companions come with lifeless performances as they tell a story with every single genre trope in the book, including a quiet hero who has been chosen by prophecy, a heavy-handed nature vs. humans/technology theme, a Force-ghost little girl who isn’t actually there, and an amnesiatic character who at one point is stricken with a second dose of amnesia so she remembers even less than before.

None of that would be a deal-breaker for me were it not for the fact that the execution of its trope-filled story isn't delivered with the kind of punch that can make up for it. It's on the weaker side with consistently weak dialogue and reveals I saw coming from about 10 miles away. If you’ve played a JRPG in the last twenty years, there’s nothing about this story that hasn’t been done better in numerous other games, and if you’re expecting the quality to be near the level of something like Xenoblade Chronicles, you’re almost certainly going to be disappointed. It’s especially weird just how flat most of the characters are; they rarely show emotion (sometimes with in-universe reasons, not that the justification makes it more interesting to watch). The robotic animations, lifeless eyes, and long silences in between dialogue makes nearly all the scenes between Emma and her found family pretty hard to sit through most of the time. And they do that thing where they show a washed out flashback to something that literally happened less than five minutes ago, which drives me up the wall way more than it probably should.

Also, this isn't really a specific pain point, but I feel obligated to mention just how much of the dialogue is taken up by characters talking about food and the eating of it. It'd make sense if it was woven in thematically, but it's not and I’m not sure if the writers were just super hungry when they wrote this or what, but it’s pretty bizarre.

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 7.

There’s a great fundamental issue at the heart of House Targaryen that has too often gone unexamined and underexplained in House of the Dragon, despite its name, and that’s how the dragons work. This show has followed its predecessor’s example in leaning into the human drama of Westeros and away from its more fantastical aspects, but there’s a limit to how well that works, and in this engaging and generally fun episode (unless you’re Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra), they finally get their teeth, and claws, into it.

The question is what, exactly, is the relationship between rider and dragon for House Targaryen and their allies? What are the obligations between rider and beast, if any? How (or how much) do they communicate? Do their feelings affect one another? There have been suggestions, occasionally, that having a dragon may affect one’s temperament (or that one’s temperament may affect one’s chance of bonding with a dragon); there’s a clear implication that losing your dragon is a form of emasculation for Tom Glynn-Carney’s Aegon II and the late Viserys (Paddy Considine). But it’s never been clear if it matters, and how much, beyond prestige in the internal Targaryen pecking order.

This time, however, we get some key hints that there’s more of a link than perhaps we were shown before. The scenes of dragon conflict, as when Rhaenyra finally discovers that her husband Daemon (Matt Smith) has been lying to her to protect his daughter Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) and flies to confront both along with Addam (Clinton Liberty), suggest an emotional closeness. As the humans shout at one another, their dragons roar and bellow and, occasionally, threaten to flame, and it’s absolutely clear that they’re reflecting something human and vice versa. Later in the episode we see Aegon screaming in sync with his steed Sunfyre, both disfigured and defiant and apparently on the verge of madness, and the impression is confirmed.

The episode also begins with a dream of Helaena (Phia Saban) and in fact heavily features her dreams - or perhaps Dreams, of the prophetic kind. So what does it mean that she sees herself on her dragon, Dreamfyre, shouting “Dracarys!” as an angry mob rushes at them in the Dragonpit? What does it mean that she imagines a quiet life on the farm with her children (it looks like both Jaehaera and a younger boy, presumably the one she’s currently expecting) when an eclipse occurs? Rhaenyra is putting her younger half-sister under pressure to share her Dreams, desperate for reassurance that she is on the right path, but it’s not clear that Helaena has any such comfort to offer.

Of course, that’s far from the most screwed-up dream this episode. That prize goes to Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), who sees his mother Alicent (Olivia Cooke) arriving at Harrenhal and the two of them tumbling into bed together before realising it was all a dream. And then he wakes up and she has indeed arrived. Awkward! This may not be the dictionary definition of “headfuck” but it should be. Alicent babbles, Aemond is more taciturn, Alys (Gayle Rankin) is rightly suspicious of the newcomer. Aemond shares her wariness to a degree, enough to murder Alicent’s travelling companion (who, to be fair, is there to help assassinate him), but not enough to refuse the poisoned nightcap she offers after the world’s most awkward meet-the-mother-in-law dinner. Alicent creeps out of the castle and into the wind, figuring that the job is done and stricken by it, but Aemond stumbles to Alys at the first stomach pangs so he’ll probably recover.

Meanwhile Rhaenyra is still pulled in every direction and failing to deal with any of her problems, and it creates a vacuum at the seat of her power. Torrhen Manderly (Dan Fogler) is furious that he’s been left to hold the bag for everyone’s money woes – something that is literally his job -- and Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) is trying to make herself a conduit to the people and being rejected on all sides. She manages to, ahem, reconnect with Rhaenyra herself by the end of the episode (is that what the kids are calling it these days?), but she’s still caught in-between a regal rock and a common hard place, and that’s a tough situation to be in.

Daemon, too, is looking more woebegone than we have seen him before. He has belatedly realised that his daughter may desperately need him, which by Westeros standards makes him father of the year against almost zero competition, but in trying to protect her he has broken his wife’s heart. And also, he’s almost entirely failed to protect her; he’s just separated her from her dragon and gone home. He’s also increasingly floundering in council, suffering the same myopia as Rhaenyra and failing to look past his personal passions to the big picture.

It’s a mess. The only person laughing – and laughing a lot this time -- is Ormund (James Norton), who’s riding high despite the imminent arrival of the Rivermen outside his hastily built walls and the fact that he’s probably in last place in that aforementioned father of the year competition. He holds Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) captive, and cuts off his finger as proof of life to attempt to keep the Velaryon men from plugging the policing gap in King’s Landing (an efficient and speedy postal system still appears to be operating between Tumbleton and King’s Landing). He’s also keeping his ward Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and cousin Gwayne (Freddie Fox) in the dark about his plans, to their increasing frustration. And, in the episode’s final big reveal, he’s courting the dragon rider Ulf (Tom Bennett), trying to turn him from Rhaenyra’s service with the promise that he’ll become Lord of (Corlys’) Driftmark fortress, and also that he’ll be free to drink whenever he wants. It’s not clear which is the bigger inducement to the big ol’ lush but it could spell big trouble for Rhaenyra if he turns.

So the tally was six dragons for Rhaenyra (Syrax, Caraxes, Vermithor, Silverwing, Moondancer, Seasmoke) plus one unreliable wannabe ally (Sheepstealer). Then there was one MIA for the Greens (Vhagar) and one out of combat (Dreamfyre). Now there are five for Rhaenyra, two of them perhaps injured; two for the Greens (it looks like Ulf’s Silverwing and the resurgent Sunfyre) and potentially two MIA dragons (Sheepstealer and Vhagar, still) to potentially change that calculus further. It’s all at play going into the Season 3 finale, and it’s still not clear how far these flames could spread.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t carry IGN’s typical score out of 10, because it really wouldn’t be at all fair to simply pick apart old games published multiple hardware generations ago and make them sweat under the harsher standards of 2026. What we will be doing, however, is re-examining what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release, digging into what they achieved and the legacies they established, and rediscovering how much fun each of them remain today. We’ll also be identifying both the parts of the GTA experience that have seen the most evolution and growth, as well as the parts that remain fascinating, commendable, and timelessly impressive. At the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly sit in my long-term love for this series. First cab off the rank? The original Grand Theft Auto.

When the original Grand Theft Auto arrived towards the end of the 1990s, it was like nothing I’d ever played before, but it somehow also felt like I’d been in training for it most of my life. On the one hand, it was essentially the digitisation of an entire childhood looming over a 2D toy car mat – my diecast collection scattered around me as I simulated countless car chases from above. On the other, it felt instantly familiar to play – like an intuitive yet anti-social distortion of the top-down delights of Codemasters’ Micro Machines. Grand Theft Auto was bold and brash. It was also brutally unforgiving, regularly frustrating, and cumbersome to control. But despite that, I was consistently drawn to it – like a moth to a flamethrower. Nearly 30 years later, I was more than a little curious about how I’d fare playing it all over again, but I’ve found myself with a largely unchanged opinion – continuously stumped by its absolutely unsympathetic difficulty, yet consistently charmed by its wanton silliness, varied vehicles, hilarious sound effects, and trendsetting original soundtrack.

It’s very easy to look back at the original GTA as a product of a different era, and that goes beyond its old school, top-down aesthetic. Its arcade-style approach to progression, which is baked around trying to maximise your overall score for each level while juggling a very limited set of lives, is nothing like the GTA series we’ve known since its complete reinvention at the dawn of the century. There’s no meaningful story here to speak of; just 90-odd seconds of cutscenes where a gallery of criminal stereotypes either pass on their thanks, or issue you direct threats related to putting unwanted things in your butt.

However, GTA was already a product of a different era upon its initial release in European territories in 1997 – and even more so by its North American launch in 1998. The flat sprites of its vehicles and pedestrians give it that 2D-adjacent look, even if people often gloss over that the cities themselves are actually rendered in 3D. But GTA found itself sandwiched between stuff like the debut of Gran Turismo and the arrival of Half-Life, Unreal, and Metal Gear Solid. We’re talking Tekken 3, Thief, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. What I’m saying is that we knew where the cutting edge was in the late ’90s, and GTA didn’t really feel like it was on it.

And yet it still works, and that’s really thanks to the high level of player agency it offers. The three maps may not be enormous by modern standards, and the selection of weapons is admittedly slim, but GTA was unprecedented in terms of the open-world freedom it allowed. It feels unlikely that anyone at developer DMA Design could’ve fully understood just how stealthily innovative GTA would ultimately be, but it nonetheless laid down the bedrock for sandbox action gaming as a whole. Complete tasks as clinically or as chaotically as you choose. Navigate Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas however you see fit. Take whatever vehicle you want, and take on objectives in whatever order works for you. Not interested in completing actual missions? GTA is engineered to allow you to ignore them entirely. You can simply steal cars, wreak havoc with pedestrians, and battle law enforcement.

5-George-K

Make no mistake: GTA is a somewhat clunky game to play. This was true in 1997, and even more so now. To be clear, I don’t personally have major problems with the driving. Yes, it suffers a bit from the jerkiness of the camera zooming in and out. Yes, you’ll bump into other cars regularly as they appear on screen too late to avoid. Yes, some cars are too fast for their own good, with the camera unable to zoom out fast enough (or far enough) to avert spearing into high-speed crashes. Yes, motorbikes are pretty pointless, and I spend more time getting back on them after wiping out than I do riding them in the first place.

Broadly, however, I believe the driving is quite fun – and I suspect a lot of that probably stems from my background with Codemasters’ Micro Machines series. For context, the Micro Machines series was one of the most-loved racers of its era – and certainly one of my own favourites as I grew out of rolling around on the floor making engine noises. Its top-down perspective was really the perfect training zone for a game like GTA, and I would suggest that – in the late ’90s – there’s an incredibly strong chance that a player of GTA would’ve had some kind of previous muscle memory from Micro Machines nestled somewhere in their fingertips.

I can appreciate that without that prior experience there are elements of GTA’s driving controls that may be a little hard to hurdle. For instance, when cars are headed down the screen, from top to bottom, the controls remain consistent. That is, stab left, and your car will turn to its left – and immediately head to the right of the screen. It’s ultimately a car, so it’s entirely logical that left is always left; it’d be untenable to have the controls flip mid-corner. But this kind of thing is printed into my brain. It’s second nature – if not from Micro Machines, then from an entirely analogue childhood of racing R/C cars and quickly learning everything is mirrored when they’re racing back towards you. However, I can anecdotally report this was initially a bit of a braintwister for some of my kids, so I can see how the controls might seem a little obtuse at first. I feel like they were initially treating the car’s direction like a cursor, rather than the car as a discrete object.

The lack of an in-game map spun them out a little, too. Luckily, I still have actual fold-out paper maps of these cityscapes, which are genuinely essential to complete certain missions (like quickly finding the nearest bomb shop before a strict timer runs out). They proved to be a neat novelty for kids from a generation who’ll never know what it’s like to navigate your way to an unknown location by leafing through a dog-eared street directory that smells like petrol and wet socks. My GTA maps are a little flimsy these days but, considering GTA 6 and future PlayStation games in general won’t even be getting a disc, they’re also a fun if now bittersweet footnote in the story of physical gaming media.

Busted

It’s on foot where GTA falls down and, unsurprisingly, the same things that frustrated me about it in the late ’90s continue to do so today. For context, the tank-like on-foot controls are a side effect of the fact that this was a time before dual analogue controllers became the default. Whether you’re on PC with a keyboard or PlayStation with a controller, all you can do is turn left and right, and move forward or backwards. Don’t think of it like a primitive version of a modern, twin-stick shooter like Hotline Miami – you’re really just a tiny, slow car with legs. The Micro Machines-style controls make less sense on foot, and they’ve definitely dated.

The upshot is combat is harder than a $2 steak. It's tougher to deal with clunky controls when just one hit will kill your character. Body armour pickups are available, but they’ll only protect you from three hits. It’s also incredibly difficult to line up shots from long distances, and not much easier at close quarters. It’s particularly tricky to turn and shoot at pursuing police since, by the time you do manage to pivot 180 degrees, there’s typically only time to get one or two shots off.

The pistol is a mostly useless weapon overall, in this case. The machine gun is far more effective, since you can spray a burst in an arc and get at least one round to hit. The flamethrower is the most trusty option, but you won’t see a great deal of it without resorting to cheats.

I cheated like hell when I played GTA as a teenager, and I’d honestly be surprised if that wasn’t the case for most people of my vintage. The action is a lot more fun with 99 RPGs in your back pocket. Cheats are very much an integral part of GTA’s legacy. While cheats have become depressingly rare over the last several generations, the GTA series – up until GTA 5, at least – remains one of the last bastions of fun, silly, and useful cheats.

Gouranga!

While GTA invariably found familiar ways to frustrate me, there is still a pile of things about it that bring a grin to my face in 2026.

I appreciate the variety of cars, and I greatly admire the way they look. Sure, these 2D sprites are typically quite tiny on screen, but each car has been crafted with enough care that they’re not just blobs of pixels that look vaguely like cars. They have terrific depth, and the curves of an off-brand VW Beetle are noticeable and distinctly contrast the flat and angular lines of a boxy American sedan – despite the fact both are simple 2D images.

I also enjoy that the mix changes up between cities. Vice City has more exotic supercars that are unique to its beachside streets. San Andreas is the only place you’ll find the floral-painted Love Wagon. Each city has bespoke cop cars with different liveries and siren layouts. There’s effort to make each place distinct, and the cars are a big part of making that happen. The seeds the studio planted here in this regard would truly germinate in 2004’s GTA: San Andreas, though it’s crazy to think this happened just seven years later.

Moreover, I love the resemblance that many of the cars have to Matchbox cars of the ’80s, to the point where it’s entirely obvious the team were simply turning photos of actual models into in-game sprites, wholesale. Sure, it’s fair enough to argue that GTA’s F40, Diablo, 911, or Viper lookalikes could have been just as easily gleaned from photographs of the real things than toys, but then you spot stuff like the orange-roofed ambulance, which still sports an identical E on top from its equivalent Matchbox model. Hell, GTA’s Flamer has the whole livery from the Chevy they sourced it from – squint real hard and it still says 57 Chevy on the deck lid!

Even more than the cars, I hugely appreciate the soundtrack. So much effort was made to build a series of radio stations filled with credible-sounding music. Credible is actually an understatement considering how many of these tracks are genuine earworms. You could actually put GTA’s PlayStation disc into a standard CD player and simply play the music. This functionality wasn’t actually unique to GTA at the time, but it’s still nifty. Did I do that? Hell yes, I did. I even recorded it onto a cassette so I could play it in my car.

Beyond that, GTA’s completely silly brand of squelching hit-and-runs and over-the-top violence keenly reminded me of how successfully it weaponised controversy as a free marketing tool around the time of its launch. It certainly wasn’t the first game to cause a ruckus for gratuitous vehicular violence. In actual fact, that distinction is owned by an arcade game called Death Race, released way back in 1976, which caused a huge fuss in the mainstream press for allowing players to run over and kill crude-looking pedestrians on screen. But the hullabaloo around GTA was hefty at the time, even in the immediate wake of Carmageddon – which caused a large fuss of its own a few months before GTA’s launch.

Now, even back in the late ’90s I did think the reaction was a little overblown. That is, 1996’s Die Hard Trilogy predated GTA by a year, and that featured pedestrians getting absolutely splattered left and right – complete with a wiper animation clearing the blood from the screen when driving in first-person. But, yes, there’s no denying the original GTA pushed the envelope in ways not even the modern series would attempt today, whether that’s mowing down a line of Hare Krishnas, blowing up a school bus, or indeed assassinating the ‘High Priest of Babylon’ – who turns out to be none other than the President of the United States himself. GTA’s low-fi aesthetic makes a lot of this stuff feel pretty goofy and harmless here, but certainly at least some of it would be a little too grim to sync with the satirical sensibilities of the modern series.

Verdict

Like a Stone Age axe, Grand Theft Auto is hard, primitive, and – honestly – more than a little cumbersome. However, like said axe, it’s nonetheless a valuable artefact that maintains an effective edge to it. Fearless but flawed and endearing but unnecessarily difficult, the original Grand Theft Auto may be tricky to wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who didn’t previously play it during its moment back in the late ’90s, but I can’t deny how fascinating it’s been to re-experience its prehistoric brand of open-world freedom in the context of everything that’s come since. It just demands patience, precision, and a paper map by your side.

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

Spoilers below for Episode 10 of Cape Fear. Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV.

After 10 episodes of acid-tripping, toe-eating, grave-sleeping craziness, Cape Fear reaches its inevitable gonzo climax this week with a jam-packed hour filled with fire, wind, rain, and the entire Bowden family put on trial. The full season of the Apple TV series has swung wildly from incredible melodrama to clumsy wheel-spinning, but this week’s finale — titled “The Executioners,” in a nod to the novel on which the whole Cape Fear universe is based — mainly sees the show stick the landing, even if the denouement is a frustrating ploy for a Season 2 renewal.

When we last saw Anna, she was swimming away from Max Cady’s deranged family, having jumped off his sister’s houseboat after uncovering a slew of their buried secrets. After Anna escapes, Max arrives for a big ol’ miscreant family reunion and castigates his father, sister, and maybe-product-of-incest son for letting her get away. Enraged, Max pulls a gun and shoots both Crystal and possible-son Luke in the stomach before pistol-whipping his father and locking him in a cage. Max then proceeds to dump gasoline over the whole boat and set it ablaze, his family trapped inside.

In a show full of shocking moments, it’s great to see Cape Fear up the ante (and body count) so early in the finale. We think we’re building up to a drawn-out series of major revelations, but instead Max Cady just burns everyone alive. It’s a testament to what the show does best: shocking, over-the-top moments that are at once unhinged and vital to the show’s appeal. While I would have appreciated some further explanation of the entire Cady family’s twisted backstory, the quick execution of an entire boatload of pivotal characters grants new, major insight into Max’s depravity and sets the stage for the season’s final confrontation.

After escaping, Anna finds her way to a road and is promptly hit by a car. She pops up and bums a ride back to Savannah while Tom makes bail thanks to his erstwhile paramour Lexi, who still believes he’s an asshole but “just not a murderer.”

At Max’s restaurant opening (yes, he’s still hellbent on this weird little side project), Anna shows up brandishing what initially seems to be a gun but ends up being a Bluetooth speaker. She holds it up, Say Anything style, and plays Nevaeh’s recorded confession (thanks, Natalie) followed by a video clip of Max urging Amy to kill herself from all the way back in Episode 1. Since Max is famous, naturally the press is at the event and hears every word. Enraged, Max chokes Anna before the cops tackle him to the ground and haul him away.

As literal storm clouds gather overhead (there’s a hurricane coming, remember), the entire family reunites at home. Soon, the cops show up to inform them that, surprise, Max overpowered the SINGLE officer they had driving him to prison and is once again on the loose. They literally tell the Bowdens, “Sorry, we fucked up,” before peacing out.

With Savannah under an evacuation warning, Tom convinces Anna to take the kids out of town while he stays behind to kill Max. As they begin to pack up, we’re given what is probably the most hilariously incredble shot of the entire series: Max Cady, who the cops had been searching for but had not been able to find, standing on top of the roof of the Bowden's home, smiling menacingly while a hurricane builds overhead. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the series as a whole: a visually stunning, shocking image that’s both thrilling and laugh-out-loud funny.

Max jumps off the roof and slams into Zack, who was looking out an open window at the exact wrong time, and takes the boy hostage. Max forces Natalie to tie her parents to chairs and then injects Zack with a superdose of the mind-control drug he had given him in Episode 7. Max then proceeds to put Tom and Anna “on trial,” claiming they conspired to send him to prison for “their own personal reasons.” He threatens to have Zack bite off his own tongue (which he promptly starts to do) before Anna spills it all.

Anna confesses that, during Max’s trial, there was a leak that the jury was deadlocked and, because she was terrified of him, Anna forced Max into a plea deal. There was a chance that the jury would have found him innocent but, fearful that Max was Natalie’s biological father, she wanted to put him away. Anna then details how she suspects that Luke is actually his and Crystal’s son. Max claims this couldn’t be possible because Crystal was incapable of having children. (Notice how he never said that it wasn’t possible because he hadn’t slept with his own sister...)

After a violent interlude in which Max has yet another seizure and pleads to his god Shangó for a verdict for Tom and Anna, Anna puts the pieces of the entire, seedy Cady family mystery together: Crystal was not Luke’s mother, but Max’s wife, Melissa, was. Max didn’t kill his wife and son; Crystal killed Melissa out of jealousy and ripped the baby from her, claiming Luke as her own. Max wasn’t responsible for the murders; it was Crystal all along, and Max inadvertently burned his child alive on the houseboat.

It’s a great climactic sequence in which many of the series' myriad loose plot threads are neatly tied up. Although revealed mainly through exposition-heavy dialogue, the scene is miles better than last week’s terrible revelatory phone call between Nevaeh and Max. This one at least quickly answers numerous open questions and propels the action foward.

As Max wails in agony, Natalie manages to escape and shoots Max in the head with a nail gun. Zack comes out of his drug-induced stupor and attacks Max. Anna manages to stab Max in the back before Tom chases him to the backyard and tackles him into the pool in an attempt to drown him. As Natalie yells, “Kill him!” Anna jumps into the pool and calmly steers Tom away from doing just that, telling him it would be better to let the man who’s been maniacally tormenting her family “die in a cage.” As they pull an exhausted and broken Max out of the pool, the Bowdens huddle together as the rain pours down.

It’s an extremely unsatisfying moment in what, to this point, had been a stellar final episode. Not having Max Cady meet his end is an obvious ploy for a Cape Fear Season 2 renewal. After all the Bowdens had been through — all the lost appendages, strangers living in their walls, false incarcerations, jobs lost, and reputations ruined — to think that they would let Max Cady live is borderline laughable. The Bowdens, as the series has shown time and time again, are not good people, and it’s unbelievable to think that they’d let their tormentor see the light of day.

Despite this, “The Executioners” is an entertaining, serviceable finale to an action-packed season of television. Even though it ends with an annoyingly overt nod to a potential continuation (the last shot is Amy Adams’s Anna literally LOOKING OVER HER SHOULDER while her family enjoys a barbecue), the major revelations, shocking character deaths, and tight climax bring a mostly satisfying end to the show.

If there’s one consolation to the frustrating final moments of the episode, it’s that we may one day be graced with more gloriously colorful, mind-bending, and outright insane interactions between the Bowden family and the man who nearly destroyed their lives. It seems impossible, after all they’ve been through, that the Bowdens would interact with Max Cady; if they were smart, they'd pack their bags and immediately get the hell out of town.

But, having watched all 10 episodes of Cape Fear’s first season, we know that if a maniacal, malevolent psychopath somehow waltzes back into their lives in a second season, the Bowdens won’t be able to stay away.

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 2, “The Griffin Incident.”

Hey, what do you know? In the latest episode of Strange New Worlds, James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) is bumming around with the crew of the Enterprise again. But man, did he pick the wrong week to play third wheel to La’an (Christina Chong) and Spock (Ethan Peck). “I can’t shake the feeling I’m in the wrong place,” he says in his log, even if he doesn’t realize how right he is about that statement.

“The Griffin Incident” is a full-on haunted house episode, a horror story set on a Constitution Class starship that has plenty of creepy-crawly moments as well as some big-time gore the likes of which we haven’t seen since Star Trek: Discovery Season 1, when that show was flirting with how far it was willing to push the sex and violence factor in the new-for-the-franchise streaming space. It didn’t take long for Disco to realize Star Trek didn’t need to lean into that stuff too much, but for whatever reason this episode of Strange New Worlds goes back to that well again, even if it doesn’t need to. It’s scary without the gore.

Things start with the three officers heading back from the “Future Federation Leaders Retreat” – those kiss-asses – only to come across a good old-fashioned mysterious signal that needs investigating. And that, of course, leads them to the USS Griffin, a long-missing Starfleet ship that they soon find out is chock-full of horrors.

Once aboard, they realize that everything is out of whack. There’s gravity and oxygen even if there shouldn’t be, there’s no sign that anything bad has happened onboard, and yet the computer is fracked and there are no crewmembers to be found… well, aside from the ghost lady who is walking around the ship and seemingly disappearing at will. This leads to a fun exchange between Spock and Kirk:

Spock: “There are faint traces of negatively charged ions.”

Kirk: “You mean a ghost?”

Spock: “I mean negatively charged ions.”

And really, that’s where this episode works best – in the character dynamics that are explored because of the horrors the trio encounter. As they begin to split up (this is a horror story after all!), they each encounter strange and horrible illusions that feed into – or are fed by – their subconscious. For Spock it’s the human vs. Vulcan debate, for Kirk it’s the abandonment of his family, and for La’an it’s the burden of her genetically-enhanced origins and the potential changes that were happening to her in regards to that even before she landed on the Griffin.

At times, the episode actually evokes the old Next Generation story “Night Terrors,” right down to the corpse in a body bag coming back-to-life moment that happens while Spock is trapped in sickbay. Bringing T’Pring (Gia Sandhu), or an illusory version of her, back to explore Spock’s anxieties is a nice touch, and it’s comforting hearing her say all the things you’d hope she would say to Spock – telling him she did not care for surprises was a mistake, she has sought therapy since their break-up, she did not love him as he deserved. But of course, this is Dream T’Pring, or rather Nightmare T’Pring, which means that cutting Spock’s ear tips off with scissors is also part of the deal. The lesson he learns from all this? Humanity is his greatest strength.

As for Kirk, the writers of the show continue to back-fill his history with more info on Carol Marcus, and now their son David as well. Kirk feels the gravitational pull of his career versus family life, and the tragic part of this thread is that we also know how this story will end. Despite however many trinkets Kirk brings back for David “like an apology for never being around,” as was the case with Kirk’s father, his relationship with David will wind up being even worse than his and Sam’s is with their dad. He won’t even know his son, and as illusory Sam predicts, “We’re gonna die out here in space alone like Kirks are born to do.” That will eventually happen to both Kirk and David, and La’an later spells out David’s fate even more explicitly: “Your little boy is going to die just like you, at the end of a blade, bleeding out in a dark corner of space.”

Packing in details of Kirk and Spock’s backstories is very delicate work. Knowing where Spock goes in the chronology of things, it kind of feels like the lesson he learns here is coming too early for the character, even if it’s dramatically satisfying in this telling. But the Kirk stuff really works for me; I appreciate learning about this absent father of his (Chris Hemsworth!?) and how it no doubt fed into the man Kirk himself became, and why things wound up the way they did between him and Carol and David. That the episode ends with his unanswered message to Carol and David only drives home that the Star Trek: Year One Kirk series showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman were teeing up (and which surely isn’t happening at this point) could’ve been very interesting.

Over on the La’an side of things, the premise of her losing control of her augment side and giving into her famous ancestor’s conquering ways looks to be an ongoing story this season, and here the mysterious effects onboard the Griffin bring out an ugly aspect to her. She’s already bothered by the realization from last week that something is changing with her (Spock asking her if everything’s alright keys us onto that fact), but as she starts to identify with and/or become possessed by the ghost woman onboard – who turns out to be former Griffin security chief Rose Harper – the Jack Torrance-ing of La’an kicks in. By the time she tries to beam Ortegas (Melissa Navia) into herself (!), and finds herself holding a knife to Uhura, she seems to be completely lost. (No wonder Uhura never talked about her on the old show!) It’s only a last-minute rescue by the Enterprise that saves her and Kirk, who she had put that knife right through.

That the episode ends with La’an seemingly spotting Harper out on the Griffin doing the “shhhh” finger to the mouth thing is kind of frustrating, as is the episode’s unwillingness to answer the question of what really happened on the Griffin. Was it truly haunted, or was it just another outer-space weirdo incident? We’ll likely never know, but clearly La’an’s struggle has only just begun.

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• “You know, I never liked her.”
• Everyone’s heard of the Griffin it seems? I get Starfleet folks knowing about it. But T’Pring too?
• Kirk was a boy scout after all! Don’t forget, in Wrath of Khan when the adult David refers to Kirk as “that overgrown Boy Scout,” Carol replies, “Jim Kirk was many things, but he was never a Boy Scout.” Of course, we always knew she wasn’t strictly referring to the literal idea of the Scouts with that statement…
• Maybe it’s just taken me this long to notice this, but the transporter sounds in this episode sure have a “The Cage” vibe to them.
• What the heck is Division 12 and why have we never heard of it before? Apparently the ghostbusters of Starfleet – or the Mulder and Scully? – they’re mentioned enough in this episode that you’d expect to hear from them again later this season.
• Hey, Carol just got approved for a dream project. I wonder what that could be!
• Nightmare Sam pulls a Newborn from Alien: Resurrection. Ouch.
• Stranglings, stabbings, beamings into open space. Take your pick.

I Want Your Sex hits theaters on July 31.

Given his last film was over a decade ago, it’s definitely gratifying to have a unique voice in cinema like Gregg Araki back with a new movie, even if the end result is entertaining but not a top tier new addition to his filmography. The indie director broke out in the 1990s with offbeat, edgy movies like The Doom Generation and Nowhere; he’s certainly never been shy about exploring sexuality in his work, which — as you might expect by the title — is front and center in his new release, I Want Your Sex. Araki has spoken about how a motivating factor for this story, co-written with Karley Sciortino, was the oft-repeated notion of Gen Z generally having less sex and being more prudish than the previous generation, an assertion he examines through the eyes of Gen Z protagonist Elliot (Cooper Hoffman).

Elliot’s life gets thrown into disarray thanks to his new job as an assistant for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a popular modern artist known for her provocative imagery. The very bold and forthright Erika initiates a sexual relationship with Elliot, which gets very wild very quickly, and all while he begins to have some big problems sticking to her rule of this being only about the sex and nothing else.

The first half of I Want Your Sex is very strong, with Araki’s quirky and sometimes surreal sense of humor shining through in the scenes at Erika’s studio as Elliot bonds with one of his coworkers (Mason Gooding’s Zap) while trying to avoid the wrath of Erika’s business manager, Vikktor (a very funny Daveed Diggs, who gets big laughs through some expert glares). Elliot’s central journey into becoming a submissive boy toy to his beautiful and powerful boss is funny and outrageous, with Araki really nailing the casting with his two leads.

On the heels of directing herself in a career-best performance in The Invite, Wilde is also great here as Erika, who has turned her whole life into a form of performance art. Wilde does a nice job of walking the line to keep us guessing about whether Erika really is as unaffected and amusingly laser focused as she seems, or if it’s really all artifice she’s built up around her. Meanwhile, Hoffman continues to impress early in his career following films like Licorice Pizza and The Long Walk. His incredibly accessible and likable boy next door charm is perfect for Elliot, making the character very endearing as he’s being pulled into Erika’s vortex, saying yes to anything and everything because the sex itself and his glee that she’s chosen him is so euphoric.

The movie’s standout sequence occurs when Erika tells Elliot she wants to have a threesome and tasks him with quickly finding their third; he impulsively asks his college friend and current roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), to join them. Wonders, who has impressed on The Studio, is terrific here as we see her character spiral through the excitement and tension of the imminent situation. She’s been fangirling over Erika from afar, but she’s about to cross a line with her friend. It’s a very funny, awkward, outrageous sequence that moves between broad comedy, sexiness, and discomfort in an impressive manner.

That sequence, however, is also kind of where the movie peaks, even though there’s plenty more movie after it. The third act of I Want Your Sex inevitably has to deal with the film’s framing device, as Elliot is being interviewed by two police detectives (Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) in the wake of some sort of dark event. And unfortunately, the revelations here feel a bit slapdash and less engaging than what came before it. (Am I aware of how many sentences in a review of a movie called I Want Your Sex can be seen as a sexual pun even when not intended as such? I am, dear reader…)

A couple of notable aspects about I Want Your Sex’s final act feel off. There’s more than one major line crossed by a character that both the person affected and the movie itself seem to be letting off the hook too easily. One element in particular is oddly not even really brought up again in a significant manner, despite the fact that its importance is something this movie in particular should acknowledge. It’s also annoying how Apple vanishes in the second half! There’s a plot reason for why she’s off-screen, but given her role in the film, it’s odd that we don’t really get any closure on this character after we spent significant time with her.

More so, though, it feels like the early scenes in which Araki directly tackles the guarded way young people might perceive sex these days and why that might be — growing up as part of the COVID generation is evoked — as well as acknowledging the power imbalance between Erika and Elliot are subjects that are pushed aside by the end. The movie veers into seeing this as more of a wild May/December relationship, glossing over the other interesting issues it was initially weaving in.

Tony will be released in select theaters on August 7 before expanding nationwide on August 21.

Eschewing the birth-to-death structure of celebrity biopics — as well as estate-mandated aggrandizing — Matt Johnson’s Tony focuses on a few chapters in the life of Anthony Bourdain from his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. During a summer spent in Cape Cod in the mid-1970s, teenage Tony learns for the first time that food, travel, and culture might be his forté. However, the late chef is hardly painted with a hagiographic brush; in fact, actor Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) builds on minor details from the book, like Bourdain’s cocky swagger and the ridiculous nunchucks he kept tucked into his belt, to create an insolent, selfish, but ultimately driven version of a man whose name we’d come to know.

The movie is a blast, ensuring that Johnson is two-for-two this year alongside his time travel mockumentary, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie; however, the two films could not be more different in scope and style. If anything, Tony — a more measured and intentional work — shares its tonal DNA with Johnson’s BlackBerry, an intense tale of innovators and eventual failures, which grew out of the post-Social Network tech biopic boom. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to call Tony one of the only films to truly understand and recreate what made The Social Network tick: the energy of naïve youth, no matter how destructive.

Part dramatic biography, part coming-of-age comedy, and wholly exciting, Tony begins with a highly fictionalized chapter in Bourdain’s life that sees him fibbing about a writing fellowship at Vassar so he can follow his high school crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones), to Cape Cod. The self-proclaimed author has dreams of grandeur and waxes poetic to anyone who’ll listen (drunkenly, might I add), even if it gets him in hot water. The next thing he knows, he’s working as a dishwasher in a local clam joint to make ends meet while keeping this lowly job a secret from his college peers, and sleeping on the porch hammock of his unnamed Portuguese boss, known only as “Chef” (Antonio Banderas).

The plot follows the growing proximity between Tony and Nancy in the perpetual dusk of Provincetown, but it also sees the young teen learning about the adult world — not only through his boss’ passions and failures, but through the drug-fueled sexual exploits of his coworker, Sal (Leo Woodall). Every male role model in Tony’s life seems to harbor a mysterious melancholy, leading to a fascinating set of performances from the cast. Woodall hides an aggrieved sadness just behind his eyes, while Banderas appears to live with regrets he’s long come to terms with. However, these are mere clues that inform each casual interaction rather than eclipsing the central drama. Ultimately, the mile-a-minute bustle of the cramped kitchen is where the movie lives and breathes, from the uncouth rituals of other supporting players (one particularly verbose cook is played by comedian Stavros Halkias) to the slow transition of Bourdain’s own POV on his new lot in life.

The film adapts only two short initial chapters of Kitchen Confidential, so apart from the broad details of time and place, it may as well be fiction. However, Johnson imbues the story with the spirit of Bourdain himself, capturing not only the tone of his writing (snappy, yet colorful), but the gradual widening of his perspective to consider food as a passion, an art form, and a series of local traditions. Most importantly, it reconnects artistry and artist as broad concepts, refusing to divorce creativity from even the most selfish emotional impulses. If The Social Network reframed Facebook as a romantic wound made manifest in isolation, Tony treats Bourdain’s culinary explorations as stemming from romantic pursuit while surrounded by community.

If the movie drops the ball in one notable way, it’s that Nancy is never quite fleshed out beyond this function in the story, making for some awkward (and at times retrograde) “get the girl” framing. However, Tony also unfolds through the perspective of a hot-blooded teenage boy, and includes all the things a lanky ne’er-do-well like Sessa’s Bourdain might find fascinating or alluring. It moves at the speed of rose-tinted thought, with careful visual compositions that get the point across instantaneously so they can be edited together with controlled chaos. All the while, Sessa makes for a fascinating centerpiece as a young man in search of himself, but with no way to find the right questions, let alone the answers, until he hurts those around him and learns from his mistakes.

It’s a feel-good guy movie in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, another college period piece that similarly gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched escapades, but with enough intellectual distance to excuse its visceral delights as a matter of nostalgic retrospective. It grants permission, in a way, to return to a time when the world seemed so large that anything could be possible, even when the weight of expectations bore down on you with unrelenting force.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that as much as Sessa channels the spirit of Bourdain, he also resembles Johnson himself in look and fast-talking demeanor. This ensures that Tony’s exploration of creative spark as something impure but no less valuable feels deeply personal too, as though the film were about eking out a daring space for filmmaking in the Canadian landscape in the way that Johnson and his cohorts often have. Either way, the result is a biopic laser-focused on the follies of youth and hyper-charged with all its vigor.