As the years go by and current hardware becomes increasingly incompatible with the past, the first Gothic gets harder and harder to play, making it the perfect target for a remake. The 2001 RPG is a cult classic for a reason, ahead of its time in worldbuilding and nuanced NPC interactions. I'm about halfway through Gothic 1 Remake now (review codes were only sent out four days before release), and while it has so far pulled the original into the near-modern era in terms of presentation and controls, it doesn’t touch much else. This is a mixed blessing. It’s great because Gothic already forced a higher level of engagement and immersion out of us, refusing to hold your hand in a way that still resonates in 2026 – but it was also often challenged and overshadowed by the poor quality of its story, the pacing of quests, and shallow combat, and none of that has changed either.

I first played Gothic soon after my time with The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which came out around the same time. I immediately identified them as similar games in many ways, but different in at least one stark one: while they are both dense worlds designed to get lost in with lots of mysteries to find and foes to fight, Morrowind invited and encouraged me to fulfill my destiny as the hero of this clandestine peninsula, while Gothic couldn’t care less about my survival, my progress, or my fun.

Ironically named the Hero, you’ll spend much of the first half of Gothic feeling like anything but. From the moment you are dumped into The Colony, a work camp and open air prison surrounded by a magical one-way barrier, you are met with tribulations as grand as the complicated political climate that the survivors here live in and as small as the tiny critters that can one-shot you in combat if you’re not careful.

This remake’s best upgrade is easily how it looks and sounds. Gothic had a unique style even back in 2001. It was the definition of “doing a lot with a little,” thanks to low-poly models with muddy details arranged and colored in ways that really evoked a sense of place many bigger budget games didn’t. The forests have big trees that block out the light from the sun, which is a huge contrast to the brick and mortar ruins where people are making new lives. All of this has been enhanced, with modern lighting and models that make the old castles and caves of the Valley seem more like real places. The grassy and rocky lands that make up the uncivilized spaces between The Colony’s settlements look verdant and appropriately wild now.

The sound design was always strong, too, especially in the sound effects and ambient nature noises. All of those are more robust than ever, even if the droning background music selection isn’t all that special. But the best enhancement is the completely revoiced script. The original Gothic had some abysmal voice acting and this remake does a great job upping the bar to at least “good.”

Training Days

Gothic’s difficulty is baked into its design in ways that aren't simply enemies that hit you hard. It starts with how little you are even told about how to play. The remake does you a favor the original didn't, including a small glossary of important controls for how to do basic things like pick up items and attack with bows. Otherwise, most of what you learn comes from trial and error. For instance, the lockpicking minigame, though not overly difficult to understand, is something you just have to throw yourself against until you get it, even if it means wasting a ton of picks. Thankfully, the modernized control scheme and the inclusion of controller support help sand down some of the early game edges that came from a basic inability to interact with the world around you correctly, which does get you off the blocks and into the ore mining rat race more quickly.

Combat also benefits from the revamped controls, making it easier to swing and hit enemies. This does not make combat easier overall, however, which is still just as dangerous as it was 25 years ago. Your hero starts off weak, and even lowly molerats can send you to the game over screen in a hit or two. Leveling up gets you Learning points you can spend at trainers to raise your stats, which goes a small but gradual way towards making you dangerous in your own right. Once you get better gear, you stand a better chance, but weapons of any real note can be a big investment early and armor even moreso, the latter being the biggest factor in surviving more than a few blows.

You'll be pretty bad at handling any weapon you pick up without training. It's cool to see the difference between wielding a one-handed weapon untrained vs trained (or eventually mastered). Untrained, you clutch a short sword with both hands for dear life, flailing awkwardly with every swing, while trained attacks can flow into combos with the proper timing, and can critically hit enemies. This is a fun example of a game’s storytelling goals being met both with interactive and non-interactive elements at the same time, but it still means that melee combat feels bad for a large chunk of the early game, only getting better if you can scrounge together enough money and save up a couple of levels worth of Learning points to get trained. And even after that investment, while the act of swinging a sword feels better, the actual action never evolves beyond standing in front of bad guys and bashing them until you or they are dead.

Leaning on ranged attacks from a bow or crossbow is the safest (and most costly) early game option, and though training makes your shots more accurate over long distances, it's an approach that evolves even less than melee. Magic does help both of these strategies, with offensive spells that are just better ranged attacks like fireballs, or support options that can change the size of enemies or summon monsters to help you out. Some of these spells can even have out-of-combat utility, like transforming yourself into a bloodfly so that you can fly from place to place and cut down travel time. But magic doesn't become a real factor until the mid-game, and by then you’re probably pretty well invested in other skills and stats, making the pivot to a “magic based” build a hard task unless you plan well in advance.

Listen and Learn

Information about this world has to be teased out of it, either by talking to its denizens or picking up context clues from the environment. When agreeing to quests, don’t expect objective markers to appear on your map to guide you. Hell, don’t even expect a map at all unless you plan to buy or steal one first. Especially in the early hours, Gothic trains you to pay close attention to what you see and hear. It can feel daunting at first, trying to remember where specific NPCs are at certain times of day or establish who the most important people in town are based on their jobs or how other people talk about them. Your screens are free from the tooltip detritus of modern games of this ilk, but the reward for engaging with the Gothic at this level is how great it felt every time I could navigate to a point of interest on the map based on memory and context clues alone.

Unfortunately, the overall story of Gothic doesn’t fulfill the promise of its great setting and world. The denizens of the mining colony have basically revolted and set up several microgovernments, each with their own hierarchy, economies, and organizational goals. You’ll need to join in with one of the three camps early in order to get a stable foothold in the region and start working towards your own personal agenda. Each of these camps are unique from one another and present different social and moral quandaries that are really cool to exist among. The Old Camp is the largest and most established and does the most direct interaction with the outside world, but it's also the most obviously corrupt. The Swamp Camp is a cult-led theocracy out in the wetlands filled with people who pray to a new forbidden god now that they are out of the reach of the mainland church. The New Camp is a hodgepodge of people who don’t want to live in the former camps, and is largely a pretty ruthless meritocracy where the strong and capable can have anything they want.

I’ve spent my playthrough getting into the good graces of the Old Camp, which meant impressing its leader, Gomez, enough for him to elevate me into his troop of personal guards. To do that, I had to spend a lot of time in the camp schmoozing his people enough to vouch for me, which meant doing favors for them or catching their attention in other ways. It also meant navigating the social structure of the place, sometimes the hard way. Elite guards patrol different sections of the camp and run protection rackets for the people in their districts. They would constantly try to shake me down for money in a “it would be a shame if something happened to you” kind of way, and more than once co-conspirators would try to set you up to have that thing happen to you if you don't. They all have their own allegiances to their own paying customers, of course, so if you get into a fight in a place where you didn’t pay a guard but your opponent did, they will act accordingly.

This attempt at immersion doesn’t always land consistently, though. While most citizens in these settlements are pretty vigilant against weird and potentially criminal behavior by you, its easy to avoid any real consequences if you're caught. People will stop and make a fuss if you walk into a house uninvited, but so long as you leave before someone starts swinging, everyone goes back to normal. I've been caught more than once failing to pick the lock on someone's personal treasure chest, simply walked out of the room before they questioned me, and they never brought it up again. It's the kind of videogamey stuff that happens all the time, but it stands out as odd in a game that has such an emphasis on character behavior and relationships.

Not every camp approaches social dynamics the way the Old Camp does, but in the early parts of Gothic at least, you’ll find a surprising wealth of these social lattices. Lots of early game quests put your dedication to joining a camp in direct conflict with your relationship with a different camp, meaning choices can have pretty definitive outcomes depending on how you navigate them. One quest had me chasing a guy out of town at the direction of a guard captain, only for a different guard to get mad at me about it because that person was his main source of smuggled goods. This sort of dynamic-feeling social structure was always Gothic’s biggest strength and it goes untouched in the remake. That unfortunately also means that when the main story finally gets into full swing and the rote “save the world” tale spins up, the complete shift away from all this nuance makes the back half of this game comparatively boring.

That isn’t to say that the parts that work are perfect, anyway. You’ll fight boredom throughout thanks to the uneven pacing of the story progression in every act. Back to the Old Camp example, you can impress everyone you need to impress to get a meeting with Gomez, but you still can’t actually do that until you hit level five, which means you may have to go out and grind or spend some time in other camps you don’t intend to join just to find some way to get enough experience points to meet this arbitrary goal. These gaps spent wandering around doing busy work were at least sometimes rewarded by small but neat discoveries in the wild early on, though those were mostly a new plot point that let you feel your way through the dense tapestry of the world some more. I'm only in Act 3 right now, but if the faithful one-to-one retelling of everything up to this point is any signal, the rest of the campaign is about to get pretty linear and very underwhelming.

While I still need to reach the credits before I put a final score on this review, it’s at least clear already that Gothic 1 Remake is undeniably the best way to play this cult classic RPG – and not just because its an old game that has become hard to run on new PCs as time forgets it. The scope of the changes are largely quality-of-life improvements, making it easier to look at, listen to, and interact with on basic levels. Everything of substance remains unchanged, which means the earnest and ahead of its time worldbuilding remains a high watermark for the genre, feeling like a clever and fresh take even all these years later. It also means its already one-dimensional combat, uneven pacing, and disappointingly dull main story have aged like milk. Here’s hoping there are more adjustments made to a back-half I don’t remember too fondly, but I’m not holding my breath.

Full spoilers follow for Star City Episode 3, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

It’s only Episode 3 and Star City has already gotten a (short) time jump from late 1969 to 1970. Security has tightened in the months after last episode, as Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) promised, now that she’s on the scent of Americans trying to smuggle something into Star City. Toward the end of this episode, “Bad Dancer,” we learn what it is — a small radio transceiver — and who did it (I’ll tell ya at the end of this). But the hunt for that piece of equipment that still makes it onto a Soviet spacecraft headed to the moon anyway creates problems everywhere, from everyday inconveniences to the death of a cosmonaut as a result of rebooting the onboard systems to disable the foreign radio signal.

The lockdown looks different for all of our sprawling cast of characters. Tanya Mironova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) finds solace in musical contraband pressed onto X-rays, what her stressed-out husband Valya (Adam Nagaitis) calls “bone records.” (These were real, by the way!) There’s a tragedy in the way the records warp after so few plays; she can’t even get one clean listen in because each time she’s interrupted. Still, Tanya’s connection to music allows for some lovely color to her character and draws in young Irina (Agnes O’Casey), who’s still learning the rules of engagement when it comes to being a good intelligence officer at Star City.

As part of her regular surveillance assignment, Irina listens in on the Mironova apartment. Her connection may be via scratchy tapes, but she’s clearly become endeared to the couple, especially Tanya. But Star City is a small place. Out at the town square market, Irina learns that Tanya actually teaches piano to her daughter Zoya, and Tanya invites the two of them over. Wilder yet, Irina accepts. O’Casey is great in this scene, barely concealing her feelings of interloping. It leads to Irina being probably too vulnerable in sharing details about Zoya’s father. He’s a “bad man,” but in exactly what ways, we don’t know. In a clever continuation of Irina relating to places through the tapes, the audio cuts out as she speaks. Later, she magnetizes the part of the tape of her visit we don’t hear. I’m guessing it won’t be a secret for terribly long, though. Certainly overseer Lyudmilla will catch this act of self-censorship, inquire after it and give her a hard lesson about her job.

On the space side, the Sergeis Korolev (Rhys Ifans) and Nikulov (Josef Davies) are in the throes of their next rushed moon mission, while also trying to move quickly on their secret Venus project. The Chief Designer has to do his share of smuggling, too: a gigantic deep sea pod that can take extreme levels of pressure — the same needed to withstand Venus. But in splitting their time between – and managing the stress of – the projects, that American radio transceiver manages to make it onboard Luna 17.

And who is the rat? It’s Valya, who’s been training the Luna 17 crew (which includes Solly McLeod’s Sasha). During the launch, Valya takes a trip with Tanya to see a pianist perform in Moscow, where he’s approached by a mystery woman in a manner that makes it seem like an affair, but zoom in and we hear the reality. She’s pressuring him for another job since the transceiver was found out. We’ve only spent a short time with Valya, but now it all adds up why he’s been so stressed out and a distant husband, leaving room for Sasha to elbow his way in with Tanya. I’m very curious to know how he was recruited. Blackmail? Over what?? We’ll find out!

Spoilers below for Episodes 1 and 2 of Apple TV’s Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday.

Apple TV’s Cape Fear is executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and it shows. The polished, colorful reworking of Scorsese’s 1991 blockbuster (which itself was a remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film; all based on John D. McDonald’s novel The Executioners) literally starts with a bang and quickly drags you into a pervasive sense of dread as thick as the Savannah night air.

The first two episodes, out today on Apple TV, quickly put their own spin on a familiar premise: Convicted murderer Max Cady (this time portrayed in a scene-chewing turn by Javier Bardem) is released from prison, much to the surprise of his former lawyer (Amy Adams) and her family. In this version, Adams’s Anna Bowden is married to the former prosecutor of Cady’s case (Patrick Wilson), so the anxiety that comes with Cady’s release is a family affair.

Episode 1 opens with Cady’s mistress committing suicide at his direction, opening the door to her taking the fall for his 17-year-old crime (he was accused of murdering his wife and unborn son). What follows Cady’s release is a languid, tension-filled premiere brimming with paranoia and foreboding.

As soon as Cady re-enters society, the Bowdens’ seemingly idyllic life becomes flush with ominous incidents. Strange noises begin to fill their posh Southern home. Their security system begins to malfunction. Anna and Tom’s (Wilson) daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) is followed by a strange car. A family of dead skunks is found in their backyard pool. A panther, of all things, is seen on their suburban property. Some of these occurrences are quickly explained (turns out the guy following Natalie was a podcaster obsessed with Max Cady!) but many are left unresolved (for now) and feed into an unrelenting sense of tension.

Soon, Tom and Anna’s son Zack (Joe Anders) goes missing and the dread ratchets up to 11. Cady and Anna come face-to-face at a glitzy fundraiser for the latter’s Innocence Project-like foundation. He quickly ingratiates himself with both the audience and Anna’s colleagues, but Anna struggles to hide her absolute fear. She’s not telling us about her prior relationship with Max, and all signs point to it being a while until we find out why.

Bardem is brilliantly cast here, floating through scene after scene in a turn so menacing that he might as well be twirling his mustache. As Max, Bardem exudes an unhurried charisma that makes it easy to see why so many are smitten with him (including Anna’s boss Noa, played by CCH Pounder). In perhaps his best villainous performance since No Country for Old Men (or at least Skyfall), Bardem is having the time of his life. He and Adams go toe-to-toe early and often, saying more with glances and smirks than most actors do with pages of dialogue.

For her part, Adams’s Anna is steely but vulnerable. You at once know exactly what she’s thinking but have no idea what she’s about to do. It’s a performance that complements Bardem’s brilliantly and leaves you constantly guessing what exactly happened between these characters nearly two decades ago.

Wilson’s Tom is stoic and grounded, providing a welcome counterpoint to the high drama between Max and Anna. Anders and Collias round out a solid cast that elevates what can otherwise be overly-pulpy material. Anders, in particular, gives a performance that masks a metric ton of secrets, adding another dose of suspense to a show that’s already filled with plenty.

Anders’s Zack serves as the focal point of Episode 2 where, after disappearing before the fundraiser, he reappears at his family’s home with a bloody foot and missing toe. Max is there too, pointing to more terror that he may or may not be inflicting on the Bowden family.

And therein lies the central premise and overarching appeal of Cape Fear: At every turn, you’re pretty sure that Max Cady is responsible for the strange things happening to the Bowdens, but you can’t be 100% certain. Nor can you be absolutely positive that there’s not something in the family’s past that they did to deserve it.

Episode 2 begins with a gruesome flashback (beautifully shot in black and white) showing us some of Max’s time in prison, in which he brutally murders a pair of fellow inmates. Back in the present day, Zack reappears, Max is arrested, and they all end up in the hospital where Zack’s missing toe reappears. Turns out, after being drugged – by whom, we don’t know (we do) – whomever was responsible stuffed the toe into Zack’s throat, which he vomits up in the emergency room.

Unlike the premiere, the second episode drags in places, seemingly more concerned with mood than advancing the plot. Despite this, we do get some interesting character revelations. After his mother took her own life, Max was sent to live with his father in the States, leading to an abusive childhood and potential rationale for Max’s (alleged) future actions. We meet Anna’s father Ben, whom she has cut out of her life. Anna discovers Zack has a mysterious online girlfriend, which may or may not be the alias Max is using to further terrorize the family.

Cape Fear has a lot going for it. The cinematography is lush and sultry. The acting, despite some ill-fated attempts at South Georgia accents, is laudable. The tone of suspense and dread that infects every scene of the show is borderline addictive.

The allusions here to Scorsese’s 1991 film (starring Robert DeNiro as Max Cady) are plenty. Episode 1 features vibrant, disconcerting interstitial negative images of the lead characters, which directly tie into the ending of that movie. The film’s bombastic score returns here as well, providing a jolting sense of familiarity.

This is a show that knows what it wants to be yet is not attempting to reinvent the thriller genre or be better than the versions of the story that came before. The dialogue can be overly expository at times and the thrills can border on ham-handed. But if you’re a fan of jump scares, shadows slipping through doorways, and things that go bump in the night, the first two episodes of Cape Fear likely point to a season of delightful thrills.

The three-part miniseries The Witness is available to stream on Netflix now.

Netflix’s new true crime miniseries The Witness retells the real-life murder of Rachel Nickell in London in 1992, which was a widely publicized story in Britain. The elements involved here – equal parts wrenching and compelling in terms of the aftermath of what occurred – certainly make for an involving series, even if it doesn’t quite tie together everything it feels like it’s trying for.

A veteran of British crime dramas like The Victim and Chasing Shadows, Rob Williams wrote The Witness (with Alex Winckler directing the three episodes) using Alex Hanscombe’s memoir, Letting Go, as the main source material. Alex is The Witness’s title character, a boy who is just three years old when his mother Rachel (Eleanor Williams) is horrifically raped and murdered in front of him during a walk through a park. With no DNA or fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, Alex (played as a 3-year-old by Jahsaiah Williams) is the only one who can give investigators any information to go on, but his incredibly young age makes this a daunting and emotionally precarious process.

Trying to deal with all of this is Alex’s father, André (Jordan Bolger), who’s left juggling his own immense grief and wish to protect his son from more trauma with the push to get Alex to talk about what happened. It’s an impossible situation, and there are strong and effective scenes early on as André must navigate whether having Alex talk about these things can actually help him process what he went through versus simply giving the police what they want, regardless of what it does to the boy.

Best known for playing youthful roles in series like Peaky Blinders and The Book of Boba Fett, Bolger is excellent in The Witness as André. He wears his character's mixture of sadness and frustration on his face, even as we see him do his best to push through and give Alex some sort of normal life, which becomes increasingly difficult thanks to the massive media attention they attract wherever they go.

The Witness takes place in two time periods, including the murder and initial investigation in 1992-1994, and then a decade later when André and Alex, now living in Spain, are informed the case is being reopened thanks to an advancement in DNA matching techniques. Kudos to both Bolger’s performance and to the hair and makeup teams for selling him at different points of André’s life, in a story that ultimately spans 14 years. Much of the story jumps back and forth between the two time periods and Winckler does a very good job of visually differentiating the eras so it’s almost always immediately clear which portion we’re now back in.

That being said, it’s hard not to wonder if telling this story in a more linear fashion might not have been just as effective, as it feels like the cross-cutting is sometimes a bit of a distracting, unnecessary technique. But at least it does allow us to meet the teenage version of Alex earlier, with Max Finchman also very good as a kid who has, not shockingly given all he’s gone through, grown up with some self-destructive tendencies. A complex aspect of all of this is that Alex’s lashing out has been perhaps given an extra boost unwittingly by André, whose desperation to keep their identity a secret in other countries, lest the media learn where they are, has them living with a go bag packed with money and passports by the door, as though they’re criminals on the run.

A talented cast of British character actors like Neil Maskell, Kevin Eldon, Sean Gilder, James Bradshaw and James Dryden offer solid, engaging performances as the men leading the investigation into Rachel’s death in the ’90s, with Mark Stanley then grabbing the baton for the portion set in the 2000s. There are some moments in the series that are certainly heavy-handed, such as André watching a psychologist on TV talk about the lifelong trauma Alex will likely feel, but the cast do a lot to keep the story grounded, even when it briefly threatens to feel a bit more sensationalized.

The third and final episode of The Witness jams in a lot, including the reopening of the case, the possibility of seeing the killer (Steve Stamp) in a more sympathetic light based on his own disturbing history, and discussion of huge errors on the part of the police going back to before Rachel’s murder even occurred. All of these aspects are compelling, particularly the unexpected empathy towards the killer in a story of this sort (and who it is who’s seeing them in this different manner). Yet it also feels somewhat rushed through and ultimately as though The Witness could actually have used one more episode to help flesh out some of what is being conveyed here.

Scary Movie will be released in theaters on June 5.

Scary Movie 2026 (aka Scary Movie 6) is a film that is likely to deliver pretty much what you’re expecting from it going in. After all, you already know if you loved, liked, hated, or were sorta somewhere in the middle on the early films in the franchise. And this reunion of the team who made the first two installments – with the Wayans brothers finally back guiding the series – picks up just where they left off in terms of its rapid-fire gags based on familiar movie scenes, plenty of which are lackluster and some of which are really funny.

The plot begins as a new Ghostface killer has a new target, beginning their latest killing spree by…

Eh, it’s Scream 5. They’re doing Scream 5’s plot and characters this time, in a series that has always used one or two movies as the central framework to hang the rest of its joke tangents on. Olivia Rose Keegan’s Sara and Savannah Lee Nassif’s Tuesday are subbing in for sisters Samantha and Tara Carpenter, Cameron Scott Robert’s Jack is subbing in for Sam’s boyfriend, Richie, and so on and so forth, with Sydney Park, Gregg Wayans, Benny Zielke, and Ruby Snowber filling out the new group of teens. Except in this version, Sara and Tuesday’s mother isn’t absent; she’s Anna Faris’ returning Cindy Campbell, in a plotline that layers in most of the original Scary Movie crew – including Regina Hall’s Brenda, Marlon Wayans’ Shorty, and Shawn Wayans’ Ray – onto the Scream 5 spine for a larger intertwining of two generations than that film was aiming for.

Of course no one ever goes to a Scary Movie installment for the storyline, but rather the R-rated jokes and the parodies throughout. This one delivers the expected nonstop barrage of sight gags, sound gags, sex gags, and slapstick gags – including the requisite jokes about Ray’s not-so closeted homosexuality or that Shorty quite enjoys marijuana – all while the central Scream scenario is constantly being invaded by bits culled from the likes of Sinners, Weapons, Get Out, and much more. Some of these moments, like the two scenes directly pulled from Sinners, feel like missed opportunities by just lightly touching upon a film that feels so ripe for a bigger and funnier parody. Others, like a riff on Longlegs featuring the great trio of Chris Elliot, Damon Wayans Jr. and Heidi Gardner, work better as far as hitting most of the beats you’d hope from a send-up of the source material, even with limited screen time.

In general, Scary Movie 2026’s joke success rate is unfortunately on the low side, feeling like maybe 3 or 4 out of every 10 jokes hit the mark. There are genuinely funny and clever gags here, to be sure, including surreal touches such as a moment involving a knife stabbing a poster and how the poster itself reacts. But there are also too many jokes that are whiffs or fall into the “hey, I remember when that happened in that other movie” basket, such as a Terrifier 3 parody that basically just looks and feels like Terrifier 3. Similarly, there’s a sight gag pulled from the humor-filled Final Destination Bloodlines that is just doing the same joke that movie already made rather than putting a new spin on it.

As with the original Scary Movie back in 2000, it’s also innately odd to use a Scream movie as the center of a parody like this when the thing being parodied was so self-aware and using humor to poke fun at itself and its genre in the first place. It results in scenes where it’s simply echoing the same joke Scream 5 (and, in a couple of scenes, Scream 6) already did, such as when the characters make pointed remarks about the kind of legacy sequel that we’re in the midst of watching. Also, as much as it feels silly to harp on the story, the copying of Scream 5’s plot and nearly every character from it, while then also bringing back a ton of Scary Movie alumni (including Lochlyn Munro’s Greg, Cheri Oteri’s Gail, and Dave Sheridan’s Doofy, all returning for the first time since the first movie) means there’s just too many damn characters and the cast are left fighting for screen time.

A big selling point of this movie is the reunion of Anna Faris and Regina Hall as Cindy and Brenda, given these two very talented women were always really funny together, even during the Scary Movie franchise’s weaker points. And they still are funny, but they also tend to just pop in and out of the movie — like nearly every character – and they aren’t in nearly as many of the same scenes together as one would hope. Still, they do both prove once more how well they can nail a joke, including an especially hysterical line delivery from Hall near the end.

Amongst the likeable younger cast, Keegan (legit looking like she could be Faris’ daughter) and Nassif (legit evoking Jenna Ortega) are especially funny and charismatic too, as is Snowber in a showy role that’s a bit of an amalgam of Scream 5’s Liv and Amber. And there are, per usual for this franchise, several notable celebrity cameos, a couple of which deliver some of the bigger laughs in the film.

In the midst of this, it stands out that some of the better parody moments in Scary Movie 6 (let’s just call it what it is!) aren’t even from horror movies, including one targeting a recent biopic and another one based around a huge animated sensation. Co-writing the screenplay, brothers Marlon, Shawn and Keenan Ivory Wayans, along with their nephew Craig Wayans and Rick Alverez (all five share screenwriting credit), and director Michael Tiddes often feel as though they’d rather aim their comedic barbs elsewhere than what they’re mostly confined to by this title, given some of the more clever gags involve both those non-horror targets and jokes that break the fourth wall in a major way and are about the cast themselves.

Full spoilers follow for Euphoria Season 3, which is available on HBO now.

Euphoria may end in a shoot-out, but the season itself feels more like it’s been firing blanks. It’s no surprise HBO has announced their once hit drama will end with Season 3, because there’s little left of the original spirit of the show. Even major character deaths can’t shock the series back to life. What creator Sam Levinson has given us with Season 3 is a fun enough Western but a paltry conclusion to Euphoria itself.

It’s not all terrible, despite a lackluster first three episodes. So what exactly is good, bad, and ugly? Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and his crew, Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), G (Marshawn Lynch), and Kidd (Asante Blackk), are compelling to watch as they go toe-to-toe with Laurie (Martha Kelly) and her gang of drug-dealing white supremacists. After Alamo, Bishop makes for one of the best new additions to the series as he delivers violence and philosophy via hypnotic, stone-faced monotone.

Really, valiant efforts by the cast are what keep the show worth watching. Alexa Demie reminds us just why Maddy remains such a fan favorite. Her calculating business acumen and stone-cold exterior crumble at times into stark vulnerability. Zendaya’s Rue and Colman Domingo’s Ali share several quietly contemplative scenes that echo something of the gravity of Season 1. Hunter Schafer, for all she’s barely in Season 3, plays Jules with the soft wistfulness of a bird in a gilded cage. I’ll miss these characters, even if I didn’t always recognize them this season.

The world of Euphoria is alight in Western technicolor this season, everything intense and sun-drenched. It’s easy to see where Levinson tried to sketch his Old Hollywood inspirations. In one particular scene, Cassie’s (Sydney Sweeney) stratospheric growth on OnlyFans is represented by her growth into a giant woman terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles. It’s giving Attack of the 50 Foot Woman or, like, sexy King Kong vibes. We even got a saloon stand-off in the finale, set to something that sounds suspiciously like Amazing Grace.

The fun doesn’t last, though. Levinson stuffs this final season with heavy-handed religious themes and metaphors, half-baked ideas about women’s sexuality and power, and a confusing conclusion about good and evil. Where the first three episodes seemed meant to titillate in their debauchery, the rest try futilely to make a statement on the “traditional” hawking of women’s bodies via men (i.e. enterprises like Alamo’s Silver Slipper strip club) versus new age, digital means like OnlyFans in which sex workers have more power. It’s an interesting dichotomy to explore but done so poorly here that it feels more like an excuse for Levinson to throw almost all of Euphoria’s women into some form of sex work for shock value.

There’s a contradictory conception of women as both conniving and helpless. It’s a madonna-whore complex wherein every woman is capable of great evil yet easily bested by the will of men. Levinson seems to think he’s drawing some revelatory conclusion, but the fact that the major players in the climax of our finale are three men, none of which are any of the women who have long been the core of Euphoria, renders it all moot. Zendaya’s Rue herself – who dies in the finale from a fentanyl overdose – is entirely absent from the last 50 minutes of the finale.

Euphoria becomes a quasi-parable with surface-level observations about “salvation” made through Rue’s newfound preoccupation with (and, later, Ali’s conversion to) Christianity. The promised land, according to Rue, is a Texas homestead of white, conservative Christians she visits briefly in the first episode.

Euphoria is over, and has little to show for it. Perhaps what we can take from these tumultuous three seasons are the careers it’s launched. Beyond that, Season 3 is more a vanity project than it is a tragic or even heartfelt conclusion to the lives of characters audiences grew to love. We end the series on a prayer, with Ali (now going by Martin) at the head of the table, Rue as a visiting apparition, and a family of characters we barely know. Fitting for a series that’s become an unrecognizable whisper of itself.

Carolina Caroline opens in theaters on June 5, 2026.

Anchored by two terrific leads, Carolina Caroline presents a familiar scenario in its own compelling manner. Samara Weaving stars as Caroline, whose small-town Texas life is uprooted when she meets Oliver (Kyle Gallner), a con man and thief that she clocks pulling a fast one on her boss at a gas station convenience store. Drawn to this charismatic stranger, Caroline ends up leaving town with him, asking him to teach her his criminal ways as they embark on a whirlwind romance together.

From Bonnie and Clyde to Badlands to Natural Born Killers, there have been plenty of movies featuring a criminal couple meeting and setting out on their dangerous path. But Carolina Caroline once more proves it’s not always about telling a brand new story as much as telling your version of any story well. Writer Tom Dean and director Adam Carter Rehmeier create an inviting, believable world, drawing you into Caroline and Oliver’s journey.

Unlike some of those aforementioned films, Oliver is not a casually murderous psychopath, but a more pragmatic “this is just how the world works” guy. And while there certainly is an element of exciting danger to his line of work that Caroline is drawn to, the film doesn’t play it like she’s out of control once they set out together. Instead, they are both incredibly lovesick and putting up a facade of blissful ignorance to the potential ramifications of what they’re doing, which escalates from small time cons and wallet snatching to armed bank robbery.

This is all incredibly well played by Weaving and Gallner, two actors who have both managed to build up well-earned credibility that adds cool points to any movie they’re in, thanks to their always strong performances in offbeat and cult-ready films through the years. They’re extremely charismatic and sexy together, very much selling you on the connection Caroline and Oliver quickly form.

Though the film doesn’t give you a lot of specifics on Oliver’s backstory, Gallner expertly conveys the feeling of a guy who’s gone through a lot and has a rather world-weary, old soul perspective on life, and is hiding some sadness behind his friendly demeanor. Weaving, in the middle of a notably busy run of movies — this is her third new release since March — gives her most emotionally vulnerable performance to date, and it really stands out to see her play something this open and raw right after her wickedly funny turn in April’s Over Your Dead Body.

Any film of this sort is all about waiting for the other shoe to drop when things inevitably go wrong pulling off a crime and our protagonists are now in big trouble. And yes, this is the path Carolina Caroline inevitably takes, but Dean and Rehmeier’s approach is very impressive. There is tension and excitement to be sure, but the film stays notably grounded and character-based in a highly effective manner. Ultimately, the portrayal here is much more genuinely moving than some other “sexy criminal couple” movies because you are able to truly invest in the two main characters so much and care about what happens to them.

There are a couple moments in Carolina Caroline that don’t quite work or feel too on-the-nose, including an encounter Caroline has with her absentee mother that feels a bit overly arch and intense despite strong work by the always-great Kyra Sedgwick. As a counterpoint, though, the portrayal of Caroline’s father by Jon Gries, who easily sells you on his character’s warmth and sweetness, shrewdly goes against the grain with the type of parent a girl like Caroline is usually trying to get away from in movies of this sort.

Though set vaguely sometime in the 1970s-1980s, Carolina Caroline avoids any overt or distracting “look at how different things were” inclusions or fashion choices beyond a couple of necessary era-appropriate elements like the use of payphones. It all helps to create a certain timeless “this could have happened at any time anywhere” feel.

The Legend of Vox Machina Season 4 debuts June 3 on Prime Video with Episodes 1-3. Spoilers follow.

It’s been a year since the defeat of the terrifying Chroma Conclave, and much has changed for Vox Machina, but if you need a reminder of the story so far, we do get a fantastic and visually inventive musical recap by Grog himself. After our party of heroes each went their separate ways, Season 4 catches up with them as they contemplate whether a life without adventure is truly what they wanted. The three-episode premiere is all about whether these characters can truly live without each other and without accepting the call to adventure, and it does a great job of setting up the team’s inevitable return to action while teasing the biggest threat they’ve faced yet.

But before we meet the main villain, these first three episodes do a lot to establish the state of Exandria after the defeat of the dragons. As it turns out, just because Vox Machina saved the day doesn’t mean things are fine. The premiere shows us the aftermath of the great devastation caused by the Chroma Conclave, including how many towns have been ruined and how many people have suffered or died because Vox Machina couldn’t save them fast enough. In that time, a cult has been growing for the past year promising immortality and a stop of the old order — a cult seeking to defy the gods themselves and worshipping an ominous figure known as the Whispered One. Fans of Critical Role and D&D may immediately clock the identity of our mysterious new big bad for the season, one that’s been teased since all the way back in Season 1, but his identity is kept vague for now.

Within the first three episodes, the cult is already a fascinating antagonist for Vox Machina, unlike anything they’ve faced before, and replacing big monsters with ardent believers who are also quite hard to kill. One unfortunate CGI creature in the premiere aside, the visuals continue to stand out in this show, with dynamic action bursting with vibrant colors while still being easy to follow.

The lack of Scanlan Shorthalt is very much felt in these first episodes, but luckily we have a brand new character that steps into that chaotic comic relief gap with ease. Meet Taryon Darrington, a rich fanboy who simply loves everything Vox Machina, fancies himself an adventurer, and is accompanied by his own robot biographer. Wayne Brady’s performance gives Taryon an improvised feel, like the character is refusing to go along with the script and just doing his own thing. You can see bits of Scanlan in the character while recognizing that he serves a brand new purpose in the story, teasing big connections to later developments.

Season 3 took some big swings in rearranging or outright changing events, and now Season 4 is paying that off by building up some compelling stories for our heroes. In particular, Pike benefits from these changes, with the gnome cleric still reeling from her crisis of faith last season as well as Scanlan abandoning the team. Her journey in these three episodes sees her at her lowest, struggling with the team’s place in the world and whether they’ve truly done any good. It’s clear the season is building up to some big departures for her character, a defiance of the idea of fate being written — not only in-universe as characters like Vex ponder their fate, but even whether the show itself is tied to what happened in the web series… or if there’s a better way.

Masters of the Universe will be released in theaters on June 5.

By the Power of Grayskull, etc. and so forth, He-Man is back on the big screen in the form of Nicholas Galitzine, and I should say up front, I like my action-adventure bright and colorful, my fantasy high, and tongues firmly in cheek. Masters of the Universe is trying real hard to do all three.

Before I dig into former Laika front man Travis Knight’s take on the Prince of Eternia, I think the most interesting thing this movie represents doesn’t have much to do with the movie at all. There’s an interesting conversation that flairs up every now and then, and I think we’re in the middle of it again at the moment. It’s the “it’s a bad movie, but…” conversation and it goes one of two ways. “It’s a bad movie, but… it’s fun and i love it” or “it’s a bad movie, but… but nothing, it’s just bad.” Masters of the Universe is landing at a time when we seem to be having that conversation a lot.

It’s happened a handful of times now in rapid succession. There was The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, my own review included, then it was Mortal Kombat II and The Mandalorian and Grogu after that. These are movies with established brands and identities and fan bases that go back decades. Also, they are by no means great movies, but…

It’s kind of a coin flip as to whether you like them in spite of a relative lack of quality. It’s a quirk of fate, an intangible quality that has nothing to do with the actual movie at all. Maybe you're a hardcore Nintendo fan and so long as all the characters from the games show up on screen, that’s a blast and we’re good. Or maybe you were the only kid at your school that had a Sega and you’re ride or die Team Sonic. Then you don’t have time for Mario or his Galaxy and the movie just seems bad. The point is, “it’s a bad movie, but…” has nothing to do with the movie. If it did, then it would just be a bad movie.

There’s something interesting about this particular batch of movies too, Mario, Mortal Kombat, Mando, and now Masters of the Universe -- in addition to being alliterative, which I just noticed -- have all been around for a long time. It’s interesting to have The Mandalorian, coming from a franchise famous for creating characters that make good toys, in such close proximity to Masters of the Universe, a franchise famous for spinning off from a successful toy line. We're in a wave of fan service that’s more tsunami-ish than usual.

The term "fan service" gets thrown around a lot like it's a bad thing, and I don’t think that’s always fair. If there’s an established fan base for something, by all means, give them what they want. The real challenge is making it something anybody outside of that fan base will give a damn about. But that’s one area where Masters of the Universe actually succeeds admirably, because director Travis Knight and every other creative in front of and behind the camera seems to simultaneously love He-Man and realize how stupid the whole thing is.

And while I continue putting off really talking about Masters of the Universe in this Masters of the Universe review, here’s a quick aside to say I’m very aware that not every movie has to be The Godfather, not every movie should be, nor should every movie be compared to every other movie on the same scale, least of all The Godfather. The big takeaway here is that we all bring our whole selves to the movie, even those of us who are lucky enough to review them for a living. Me and He-Man? We go way back. If my gray doesn’t give me away, I was inseparable from my He-Man toys back when he was still just on the TV after school. Dolph Lundgren’s run at the character in '87 was probably my first experience with “it’s a bad movie, but…” I was a He-Man kid and that makes me a He-Man guy to this day and that colors my reaction to this… I’ll say it now… very not bad movie.

I wasn’t expecting much; none of the trailers were terribly inspiring. But I did hold out some hope specifically because of Travis Knight. His work with Laika, like Kubo and the Two Strings, is incredible -- some of my favorite stuff, in fact. Bumblebee was a lot better than I expected it to be because he imbued that lovable yellow robot alien with some humanity, which is a thing the director honed in all those years of doing stop-motion. And one of my favorite things about this movie is that if it were animated, like most of Knight’s other work, it would’ve been the same movie.

The action and physicality throughout the movie is solid. The fight scenes are vibrant and interesting. They don’t reinvent any wheels but they are just different-looking enough from the rest of action cinema's latest offerings to make things fun. A few sequences get overly CG and start to feel a little empty, but by and large every time anybody kicks ass on screen, they really do it.

Idris Elba, in particular, as Duncan/Man-At-Arms is a character built around his fighting. It feeds into his entire arc. He’s a guy who has strongly held ideas of what it means to be a big strong man, ideas that are put to the test throughout the movie. What’s great about Duncan as well is that he’s really the one who gets to grow and change. Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam doesn’t have nearly as far to travel, and actually gets to be the catalyst for others to change more often than he’s developing himself. Adam is more of an avatar for the themes of the film -- that strength and manhood isn’t about muscles as much as listening and empathy.

Adam, in his time on Earth, found his way to a career in human resources, which is a remarkably on-the-nose alter ego for this version of He-Man, but it works more than it doesn’t. He’s portrayed as a kid who hasn’t grown up at all, living in a room with walls still papered with drawings from his childhood. That’s the world he’s stuck in, which is a perfect, and frankly ballsy, metaphor for the audience movies like this are targeting.

Elsewhere in the cast, Camila Mendes as Teela doesn’t get as much to do in the action department, but she’s definitely got her moments. The rest of the heroes of Eternia each have their own action figure speciality that keep the action choreography spicy, but their real purpose is the comedy.

There’s a grinning self-awareness to this movie that is, as I said before, its biggest strength. Take the way the character names, pulled from a 50-year-old toy line, feel like a first draft. Ram-Man and Fisto and Mekaneck, Evil-Lyn -- whose name is just a phonetic way to mispronounce Evelyn -- they’re all, quite frankly, pretty dumb. He-Man included. But instead of making the mistake of trying to have a guy named Ram-Man earnestly talk to another guy named He-Man, Masters of the Universe takes none of it seriously. And they don’t stop there, nor should they have. Travis Knight and company make the savvy choice to not take anything else seriously either.

There are synths and Brian May’s shredding electric guitar in the score. Alison Brie is hilarious as Evil-Lyn while Kristen Wiig voices an angry battle droid that’s been downgraded to a maid. There are sex jokes made at the expense of both Fisto and Ram-Man. Based on their names, you can imagine what low-hanging fruit those are, but the sheer joy and innocence with which they’re delivered make them the only jokes that could possibly work in those moments. It all adds up to a film that’s just this side of a proper spoof. In the way that Hot Shots loves Top Gun as much as it is making fun of it, as Spaceballs is to Star Wars, that’s what Masters of the Universe is doing to… Masters of the Universe. It’s why it’s got a leg up on every other entry in decades-old-IP that we’ve gotten this year. There’s an understanding of the source material at play with Masters of the Universe that’s as obvious as a sword-wielding barbarian in a fur loin cloth, and it’s most obvious when they’re talking about how silly Masters of the Universe is. It’s a magic trick to pull that off as legibly as Travis Knight does here.

But weirdly enough, and this is the thing that surprised me more than anything else in this movie that I very much enjoyed, the most unhinged and terrific part of the film is Jared Leto as Skeletor. The Morbius actor hasn't had the best run in recent years -- it was most likely Blade Runner 2049 when Leto was featured this prominently in a movie that wasn’t awful -- but this version of Skeletor is fantastic. He’s a swaggering weirdo with near limitless power that’s only matched by his fear of losing it. There’s a sass to him as well, an almost Deadpool-like meta layer, and if he had actual eyes and we could tell where he was looking, we might have caught him looking straight into the lens. There’s even a joke about what could motivate him to do such terrible things and the answer we get is... he’s just bad. He’s got a skull for a face, so he’s bad. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

Again, like some of the low-hanging fruit in the film’s humor, there’s no new trails blazed by Skeletor’s Staff of Havoc. It's like the scene where he laughs maniacally for too long and has to tell Evil-Lyn that he’s done and they can move on now. Instead of telling the same old jokes, they point out how these jokes are the same, and old, and manage to make that approach entertaining for the whole runtime. But peppered in the middle of that are bits that put Skeletor in new and modern situations to very funny effect. It’s a strangely fascinating way to go about it, one that keeps the pace of the film sprinting all the way to the end.

I started this by writing (probably too much) preamble about the handful of “it’s a bad movie, but…” entries to iconic franchises we’ve gotten lately. I would’ve guessed Masters of the Universe was going to be another one, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about that. This is a movie that knows exactly what it is and Travis Knight pulled it off. So no, it's not The Godfather, it’s not Super Mario Galaxy either, but for what it is, and considering my relationship to the franchise, I think it’s pretty great.

When the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE came out back in 2024, it offered some of the best bang-for-your-buck performance to be found in a graphics card, especially at 1440p. The new Radeon RX 9070 GRE is trying to follow in those footsteps, even launching at the same $549 price tag. But the PC gaming landscape has changed a lot in the last few years.

In any other time, the RX 9070 GRE would have a lower price tag than the original 9070; it’s slower and has 12GB of VRAM, rather than 16GB. However, due to the ongoing RAM shortage, the $549 9070 GRE is the same price as the original 9070 was at launch, although the latter has since ballooned in price.

If AMD’s $549 launch price actually holds this time around, the 9070 GRE is just as much a 1440p all-star as the 7900 GRE before it, even if there isn’t much of a generational performance uplift this time around.

Welcome to the New Normal

The main reason the 7900 GRE was such a great graphics card when it launched in the US was that it was so much cheaper than the 7900 XT, while also being an extremely strong 1440p graphics card. It launched for $549, compared to the 7900 XT’s launch price of $899, even though the latter had a few price cuts under its belt by then. But this generation is a little bit different.

With AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics cards, Team Red basically ignored the high-end, launching the 9070 XT as its most powerful card and leaving the Nvidia RTX 5080 and 5090 to just own the high-end. That’s why, when I saw the 9070 GRE’s $549 price tag I had to do a double take. This is a mid-generation budget play that, at least at first glance, seems just as expensive as the original 9070, but with a smaller GPU and less VRAM. But the 9070, just like every other GPU under the sun, has only gone up in price since it launched.

At the time of writing, the Radeon RX 9070 will set you back around $620, which is around 12% more expensive than the $549 9070 GRE. With that $70 price difference, the 9070 GRE shaves off 8 Compute Units (CUs) and 8GB of VRAM. And I suspect that the latter is largely the reason why the 9070 GRE isn’t a much more affordable card right now, even though it really should be.

As I’ll get into a little further down, that 12% price cut doesn’t exactly come with just 12% worse performance. Instead, the 9070 GRE is anywhere between 15% and 32% slower than the original 9070. If prices carry on the way they are right now – and there’s no guarantee that’ll happen, the 9070 will remain the better value. But with the way RAM and VRAM prices have been trending basically all of 2026, there will likely come a time where the 9070 GRE’s lower 12GB capacity will likely save it from the worst of the price increases.

Specs and Features

Just like the original RX 9070, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE is built on AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics architecture. This generation improves the general performance of each compute unit, but also introduced third generation ray accelerators and second generation AI accelerators. The latter are behind the much-improved FSR Redstone, the first iteration of AMD’s upscaling tech to actually use AI to scale up visuals in games.

AMD’s Radeon 9000 cards weren’t the first to include these AI accelerators, that honor goes to the RX 7900 XT and the rest of that lineup. However, these older AI accelerators were relegated to boosting AI performance in creative and professional workloads. Of course, the second-generation AI accelerators also boost these pro apps, but Team Red finally let them loose in games. Luckily, AMD is also retroactively letting older GPUs use the new upscaling models later this year.

On paper, the actual GPU in the RX 9070 GRE is a slightly downgraded, or binned RX 9070. The GRE comes with 48 Compute Units, compared to the 9070’s 56, making for a total of 3,072 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). But AMD did more than just disable one of the shader engines, it also cut some of the VRAM.

The original 9070, along with its big sibling, the 9070 XT, came with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, but the GRE cuts that down to 12GB, giving it less memory than the 9060 XT. Given the current state of computer hardware, I would say this was due to the RAM shortage that’s driving up the prices of everything right now. However, just like the 7900 GRE before it, the 9070 GRE launched in China first, and came out there before the current memory apocalypse even started.

If the current RAM shortage wasn’t happening, this would probably make the 9070 GRE quite a bit cheaper than its current $549 launch price, but c’est la vie.

With one of the shader units disabled, the 9070 GRE does consume quite a bit less power, peaking at 196.18W throughout my testing, compared to the 9070’s 247.94W. That didn’t quite match up with lower temperatures, with the two GPUs getting nearly identical results, but that probably comes down to the difference between the coolers. Just like every other Radeon 9000 series card, AMD did not release a reference version of this graphics card, and is depending entirely on third-party manufacturers.

Performance

According to current prices, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE is smack dab in the middle of the 9060 XT and the 9070. And, unsurprisingly, that’s exactly how it performs. The 9070 GRE is a great little 1440p graphics card, although it can struggle to max settings out in some of the most demanding games.

To test the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, I ran it through an updated suite of games to see how it would perform across a variety of different engines. I also retested all the older GPUs that I’m using to compare the 9070 GRE, because it’s been about a year since any consumer GPU has actually come out. I tested all Nvidia drivers on Game Ready driver 596.49, and all non-9070 GRE AMD cards on Adrenalin 26.5.2. The 9070 GRE was tested on a pre-release driver provided by AMD.

The first thing I test on any new graphics card is 3DMark. While these synthetic benchmarks don’t correlate exactly with real-world gaming performance, they give a good picture of the potential a graphics card has. In Speed Way, which tests DirectX 12 performance with ray tracing, the 9070 GRE gets 4,274 points compared to 5897 points from the 9070 and 3009 points from the 9060 XT, placing it right in the middle. However, AMD gets uncomfortably close to the RTX 5060 Ti on the low-end here, with Nvidia’s card getting 4,227 points in the same test.

In Steel Nomad, though, which tests non ray tracing DX12 performance, the 9070 GRE fares a lot better. Here, the 9070 GRE gets 5160 points, compared to 3690 points from the RTX 5060 Ti. That’s a huge lead for AMD here, but what’s more impressive is that the RTX 5070, which usually gives the 9070 a run for its money, only gets 5222 points in this test. That’s only a 1.19% lead for Nvidia, despite the 5070’s typical $640 price tag these days – 15% more expensive than the 9070 GRE.

In actual games, the 9070 GRE continues to live between the 9060 XT and 9070. For instance, in Call of Duty Black Ops 7, with no ray tracing or FSR and on the Extreme preset at 1440p, the new AMD card gets 136 fps, compared to 167 from the 9070 and 112 from the 9060 XT. This is a game that has always favored AMD hardware, too, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that it leads both the 5070’s 124 fps and the 5060 Ti’s 92 fps.

AMD’s giant lead doesn’t last long, though. In Cyberpunk 2077 on the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and FSR 4 set to Balanced at 1440p, the 9070 GRE gets 78 fps, compared to 91 fps from the 9070 and 61 from the 9060 XT. The RTX 5070 gets its lead back here, getting 88 fps with the equivalent DLSS settings and 67 fps for the RTX 5060 Ti.

Crimson Desert is another game that I’m testing at native resolution, mostly due to its strong performance on every GPU I’ve ever tested it on. In that game, the 9070 GRE gets an average of 65 fps at 1440p with the ‘Cinematic’ preset, compared to 77 fps from the 9070 and 53 from the 9060 XT. Nvidia’s cards have a stronger showing here, but not by much, with the 5070 getting 75 fps and the 5060 Ti getting 59 fps with the same settings.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is a game that hammers both the CPU and the GPU, and doesn’t even offer upscaling features to lighten the load. In that game, the RX 9070 GRE gets 109 fps with the Ultra preset at 1440p, compared to 120 fps from the RTX 5070 and 87 from the RTX 5060 Ti. The 9070 GRE might not quite match the 5070 here, but it does get a massive 22% lead over the 5060 Ti, even though it’s at that same $550-$560 price point.

In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I max the game out with the Ultra preset and also crank the ray tracing settings, then turn on FSR or DLSS to ‘Balanced’. Here, the 9070 GRE falls just short of the 60 fps sweet spot, averaging 56 fps. While that’s disappointing at first, it actually matches the 5070 at the same frame rate, and absolutely dominates the 5060 Ti’s 47 fps. But, just like Call of Duty, this is a game that has favored AMD hardware in all the testing I’ve done.

Forza Horizon 6 is an odd one, though. In that benchmark, the 9070 GRE gets just 60 fps at 1440p with the Extreme preset. I repeated this test several times, and yes, made sure that V-Sync was disabled. That’s still super playable, but it falls short of the 9070 at 101 fps and the 9060 XT at 68 fps. However, given how new Forza Horizon 6 is, and the fact that I was testing on pre-release drivers, I don’t think this is quite indicative of how the GPU will perform after a few driver updates.

There are some games where the Radeon RX 9070 GRE falls behind, but just like the 9070 and 9070 XT before it, this new AMD card punches way above its weight class. If the 9070 GRE’s price holds at around $549, it’s hard to recommend anything else for 1440p gaming. But, as soon as the price starts creeping up towards $600, it’s probably worth spending a bit extra on the Radeon 9070, just for the extra VRAM.

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

Full spoilers follow for Star City Episodes 1 and 2, which are streaming on Apple TV now.

For All Mankind may have just wrapped up its fifth season, which was set in the 2010s, but Apple TV’s brand-new series Star City is winding back the clock on the alt-history universe. And this time, we’re going back to the beginning of the space race to watch it unfold from the Russian perspective. From the same lead creative team behind For All Mankind, Star City has already established an intriguing version of that era’s opening salvo in its first two episodes, “The Eyes” and “A Bear on a Chain,” that’s less about the challenges of space exploration — though there’s still some of that — and more about what it’s like when one’s dreams and ambitions come into conflict with the tightly principled strictures of Soviet society.

If you’re unfamiliar with the key difference between this TV universe and reality, that’s perfectly OK; Star City will tell you all about it. In the tense first scene, a young woman is shadily scuttled out of her apartment by Soviet agents with news — they won’t say what — about her husband. She's led to the Roscosmos mission command center where she gets to watch her husband, Alexei Leonov, be the first man to step foot on the surface of the moon, issuing his state-approved landing speech in honor of the “the Marxist-Leninist way of life.” It’s effective in laying down the story from the get-go and dropping viewers smack-dab in the middle of its shrouded, paranoid atmosphere where anyone is always one bad move away from becoming the subject of a hushed political conspiracy.

It’s tempting to compare notes with Star City and the early (excellent) seasons of For All Mankind, but the new series takes care in being its very own thing in a closed system, apropos of its isolationist setting. It doesn’t alienate those who might pick this show up cold because of the appeal of a late-’60s Soviet-era thriller – you won’t find endless winks and nods to For All Mankind here – but it does add new contours to the top stories of the space race after watching them through the American side. Take the backstory behind Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) becoming the first woman on the moon because the original choice was suspected of working with the Americans — For All Mankind showed her in newspapers and on a small TV for all of 15 seconds, and yet it inspired nearly the entire Season 1 arc of recruiting female pilots. (The first female President of the United States, Ellen Wilson, came from that pool!)

Expectedly, Star City does have a couple name drops For All Mankind watchers will be familiar with: specifically Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), who starts as a kind-hearted (!) low-level intelligence operator listening to and filing reports on bugged rooms, and Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies), who’s just another scientist in the mission command lineup but isn’t afraid to toss out nutty, yet effective, ideas. Those two will have plenty to do with the American space program in their later years, but here, they’re in the beginning of their careers. It’ll be fun watching to see how their bosses and mentors — the terrifyingly steadfast and always lurking Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) and the space program’s ardently ambitious yet rulebound Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans), respectively — shape them into the people they’ll one day become.

One aspect of the show that can’t go without mention: The cast speaks English, not Russian. It’s hardly unprecedented — there was a great debate around this when Chernobyl came out in 2019 — and it’s really not that distracting hearing various accents from the UK while seeing Cyrilic smattered throughout the set. Plus, it’s understandable, since we as a society still have yet to conquer subtitles.

Star City gets through a lot in its first two episodes — going to the moon and all of the complications that come with it, a trip to Paris, a grisly interrogation, and lots more to situate Season 1’s trajectory — and it shows great potential, but I don’t think it’s been fully unlocked just yet. That’s perfectly fine; I hope I’ll look back to these early episodes and think something along the lines of You idiot, the vision was locked in from the very beginning! There have been spurts of greatness, but largely, these episodes have felt like methodical world- and character-building, making sure we’re sucked in by the ominous fog of subterfuge and made to constantly question what anyone’s underlying intentions really are. But based on the second episode’s closing escalation of security threats, Star City just might have the juice to be an exciting spy thriller that also happens to shoot people into space.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 2!

Rick and Morty's ninth season didn't have the strongest start in "There's Something About Morty," but that's ok. The series immediately bounces back with a surprisingly strong and emotionally charged sophomore episode. The show is often at its best when it explores the sheer misery that is Rick Sanchez's (Ian Cardoni) existence, and this episode is simply another reminder of that fact.

The cleverly titled "Ricks Days, Seven Nights" throws us for a loop in its opening moments, as we're not sure what the heck is going on with Rick's latest misadventure. Why is he driving an RV? Why is he calling himself Ted and hanging around with a group of affable hicks in a bowling alley? This episode doesn't waste too much time before definitively resolving that mystery, and it's an amusing reveal when we discover the truth behind the situation and the lengths Rick will go to to guarantee himself a proper vacation.

The supporting cast introduced in this episode is fine, if painted with a pretty broad brush. But those characters are mostly a means to an end. This is all about Rick in direct and literal conflict with himself, doing everything he can not to be ripped out of this idyllic existence and thrust back into the shoes of a multiverse-travelling mad scientist. It's a fundamentally sad conflict, so it's fitting that "Ricks Days, Seven Nights" is less overtly funny than many other chapters of the series.

Not that there isn't some amusement to be had. This episode gets plenty of mileage out of "Ted" transforming his RV and ordinary bowling equipment into powerful weapons. There's the epic shoot-out in the bowling alley, as Ted and the gang make their successful (but ultimately tragic) stand against Rick's drone army. But as the death of Brenda (Amy Ryan) shows, there's a fundamental darkness lurking at the center of this conflict.

The latter half of the episode really highlights that fact. It allows Ted and friends to win, but that victory immediately proves hollow and pyrrhic. The moment Ted's friends are exposed to his life as Rick, everything becomes tainted. They're no longer content to bowl, fish, and knock back a few brews. They crave laser eyes and portal guns and all the luxuries that come from being friends with the smartest guy in the universe. And so, predictably, everything quickly spirals out of control.

Episode 2 really sinks its emotional hooks in during its closing minutes. By this point, Ted may have technically vanquished Rick, but he's become Rick in every way that truly matters. He's driven his friends away. He's profoundly unhappy and burdened by the cost of the super-science that surrounds him. His vacation is well and truly over.

The final scene between Rick and Morty (Harry Belden) is a particularly strong way to cap off this bleak little conflict. Ted desperately seeks some assurance that he'll be happier and more fulfilled than Rick, and to his credit, Morty tries to provide that assurance despite knowing how untrue it is. Then Ted relents and presses the red button. At that point, we're left to question whether the button did anything at all. Was there anything left of Ted to erase, or had he already completed his backslide into becoming Rick Sanchez again? Rarely has this series been so eloquent in spelling out the sheer pain of Rick's existence.

When you think of Alienware, you likely imagine high-end gaming PCs and laptops. The brand, which operates as a subsidiary of Dell, has been a mainstay in the gaming computer landscape for decades, after all. However, this popular company has a bit more up its sleeve with the Alienware S5800, a rock-solid gaming chair that is worth a look for those seeking a mid-range seat with a lot of comfort and style.

Alienware S5800 – Design and Features

Many gaming chairs aim to embody the term with vibrant accents and "gamey" vibes, while others opt for sleeker design philosophies to fit seamlessly into a variety of environments. The Alienware S5800 falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum by embracing the gamer aesthetic without pushing things so far that the chair would look too out of place in an office setting.

This balance is largely achieved by sticking to a two-tone design, with attractive black leather wrapping the outside and white PUC leather accents along the inner sides of the backrest and outer rim of the seat pan. It's striking yet restrained. And after seeing the Alienware S5800 at my workstation each day for a while now, I've really fallen in love with how the chair blends into my setup.

The Alienware S5800's inner seat and backrest material, which features a neat honeycomb-like stitching, is also a standout – and not just for its cool looks. Its velvety texture is immensely satisfying to the touch and facilitates smooth movement when repositioning. Though it's prone to picking up pet hair very easily, as I learned the hard way with a very snuggly cat, it's nevertheless one of the most pleasant materials I've felt on a gaming chair in some time.

Elsewhere, the Alienware S5800 offers much of what you'd expect in a mid-range seat, as well as one unexpected treat. There's a removable headrest pillow that attaches via a strap, ample reclining capabilities, and 4D armrests that can be adjusted to nail your preferred height and angle. But instead of adjustable lumbar support, you get the adaptability of the ContourMax Lumbar system, which shifts automatically to grant continuous support based on your sitting position – and it's rad. More on that below.

Alienware S5800 – Comfort and Lumbar Support

The Alienware S5800 looks great, but I'm pleased to say it also brings a level of comfort I didn't anticipate in this price range. The waterfall seat is very supportive and satisfyingly ergonomic, subtly sloping at a downward angle to reduce fatigue and blood flow issues in your legs. Plus, the aforementioned velvety material has stayed breathable and cozy even during my longer sitting periods, where leathers and some other fabrics would often get too hot.

I was particularly impressed with the Alienware S5800’s ContourMax Lumbar system, which uses a layer of memory foam with four Thermoplastic Elastomer (a stretchy, rubber-like material) modules behind it that shift according to your sitting position and back shape. With 64 individual branches working to make it all happen, it quickly becomes one of those things you have to experience to truly appreciate.

I may not fully understand the deeper ins and outs of how this ergonomic-focused technology works, but I've been feeling it subtly adjusting with every minuscule movement I've made, and my back has been thanking me for it. Regardless of the angle I've sat in over the past few weeks, the lumbar cushion has met me right where I'm at and kept me supported, ultimately improving my overall posture in the process. Having used and reviewed quite a few higher-priced premium chairs with similar automatic adjustment systems, I feel confident I'd still choose the Alienware S5800's lumbar support over any of them. It's frankly delightful.

This majestic lumbar magic is nearly enough to make the Alienware S5800 my new daily driver, but sadly, there are a few hiccups that have me questioning if I could make the switch full-time. Most notably, the bog-standard 4D armrests lack much in the way of cushion, which has resulted in a bit of discomfort for my elbows during my recent extended sessions of Forza Horizon 6. Additionally, the chair only comes in a single size with a recommended height of 6', so as someone pushing 6'3", I've found that the headrest pillow has ended up feeling more like a neckrest. I'd love to see an XL version of the chair that could better accommodate taller folks like me. Granted, this shouldn't be a problem for those who fall within the average height range.

Alienware S5800 – Assembly

My Alienware S5800 arrived in a well-packed box with adequate protection inside to avoid any unnecessary movement of parts, and the unboxing experience was a breeze. The instructions are simple and easy to understand, and the assembly itself is very straightforward, which is largely thanks to a couple of much-appreciated design choices.

For starters, the chair arrives with the armrests pre-attached to the seat pan, removing one of the more tedious aspects of building many chairs. But what I loved even more about assembling the Alienware S5800 is the chair's unique backrest attachment process.

Unlike most chairs, which require you to align brackets and hold the chair at awkward angles while screwing in the backrest, the Alienware S5800 uses sleeves built into the sides of the backrest that allow you to comfortably slide the brackets into place with ease. This not only holds the backrest in place while you screw it in (a particularly big help when assembling the chair solo), but also gives the sides of the chair a cleaner, more uniform look that you rarely see on other gaming chairs due to the bulky plastic covers often used to hide the brackets.

Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 10, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

Season 5 has not been For All Mankind’s strongest outing. The Apple TV series has had a rough go at it shepherding in the next generation of space explorers, mostly because they’re not expeditionary. They’re teenagers (Lily and Alex), cops (Celia Boyd, Avery “AJ” “Tabasco” Jarrett), and regular guys who are medium-bad negotiators (Miles Dale). In saying goodbye to Ed Baldwin, the show lost its beating heart (even if Joel Kinnaman was five layers deep in old man prosthetics), passing on that burden to two of the remaining true blue believers in the possibilities of space: his daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and Helios CEO Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), who remained the best parts of this season through the bitter end.

After an uneven trajectory in the nine previous episodes, Episode 10 finally steadies the ship to adequately bring the series into its next and final round, Season 6 set in the 2020s. I won’t get too carried away in giving the Season 5 finale its flowers: “This Land Is Our Land” mostly sprints through its bloated hour and 10 minutes — the longest episode of the season — to at least attempt to button up its many open holes, particularly the drawn-out mess on Mars. The conflict does have a resolution, and it’s Alex (Sean Kaufman) and AJ (Ines Asserson) who bridge the divide between the Marsies and Marines and deliver the crucial message that a ceasefire has been called before a violent showdown on Main Street.

The bonding moments between Alex and AJ, particularly over shooting a human for the first time after learning that their mutual buddy Haskell will survive, is poignant, but not every development and tete-a-tete lands with the same force. In particular, Alex and Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) finally having it out reeked of “no other choice” syndrome to set up key points in the plot, including making Dev the one to climb to the top of the space elevator and manually hold up the comms antenna after his push for automation. His “the right people were here all along” monologue was corny, for sure, but I can’t say that him looking out over the sunrise on Mars after helping to heal a divide wasn’t at least a little moving.

What’s most suspicious about how Happy Valley plays out is how kumbaya it ends. There seem to be no consequences for anyone whatsoever, besides the Russian president Korzhenko disappearing to Crimea. The people who died at Happy Valley are honored with a proper and permanent memorial site; Miles (barf) is sworn in as the new governor and the SDM members who staged the rebellion are at the ceremony; and Dev helps replant the agridomes with Lee. I suppose the writers are waiting for the Season 6 opening newsreel to go over any of the negative fallout from the uprising and military operation.

The show had far less cleanup to do with the Sojourner crew stranded on Titan. The questions needing answered were far more simple: Will they find signs of life, and how will they possibly make it back to Mars facing an oxygen shortage and no comms with Aleida in the midst of the fighting on Happy Valley? The straightforward, if trope-y, beats on Saturn’s moon make what happens all the more impactful against the endless chaos on Mars. They find methane-based cells, literally a second form of life! But the only way the expedition crew would even be able to take that information back to the rest of humanity is if one of the three of them stays behind. Kelly demands it be her, fully owning her role as commander and taking the karmic payback on the chin for secretly overwriting Sojournor’s route to Titan. The speech in the video she made for Alex about enemies and unlikely friends felt… detached, even for the emotionally guarded Kelly. Mostly it scanned like it was written this way expressly for the purpose of foregrounding a montage of the feuding Marsies rebuilding Happy Valley together. (“This Land Is OUR Land,” indeed!) Regardless, a Baldwin is a Baldwin to the end, and it’s a real shame to lose two of the clan within the same season. Her final moments wading into a newly discovered bioluminescent lake (or however that phenomenon occurs on Titan) are beautifully melancholy.

That, however, is interrupted by a “Blinding Lights” needle drop (boo) and a zooming pan out into deep space. It’s officially 2020, baby! We’re left with a message in Russian (translated here via Google) on the screen of an ominously destroyed ship, MAP CP94: “D:/ Detection of GV 3.06.0451 // Nikulov, Loading…..,” if anyone would like to start theorizing what this could mean for next season! (“Nikulov” could be Sergei Nikolov, the head of Roscosmos who commits the USSR going to Mars and had a weird semi-romantic thing with Margo back in Seasons 2 and 3 before he was assassinated by Irina and the KGB in Season 4.) With the wrecked ship, will For All Mankind go full Alien in Season 6? Doubtful, but it never hurts to have a little fun killing time dreaming silly thoughts in the yearslong wait before it comes out; until then!

Like the man himself, a James Bond game should ooze style and swagger. There’s no point in a timid tie-in with neither the balls nor ability to bring the Bond fantasy to life, and I’ve never particularly wanted one that simply gaffer tapes all the loudest bits of Call of Duty together and stuffs them into a tuxedo. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game that’s confident and charismatic; one that both ebbs patiently and peaks violently as it segues between social stealth, dangerous infiltrations, gadget-driven shenanigans, and destructive, never-tell-me-the-odds action. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game like 007 First Light – and what we got is the best Bond game I’ve ever played.

First Light’s greatest success is just how impressively developer IO Interactive has executed on its mission to create something it can call its own within a very established universe. What we get is something that’s unmistakably Bond – and respectfully adjacent to everything that has come before it – but confidently occupies its own space as a uniquely separate take.

That is, it never seems like a situation akin to 2001’s 007: Agent Under Fire – which felt like the series was in a holding pattern before EA cut another cheque for Pierce Brosnan. No, this is a fastidiously assembled world of its very own – inspired in all the key ways by the work of creator Ian Fleming and the expectations bred by the films, but tailored for IO’s take on the series like a bespoke suit. First Light has its own M, its own Q, and its own Bond – and, after playing it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

First Light doesn’t rush this world building, patiently moving through Bond’s first encounter with MI6 as a Royal Navy aircrewman in the wrong place at the right time, to his initial double-0 training, and onto his transformative first field mission that sets up the core story to come. In another developer’s hands all of this may have been smooshed into a single opening tutorial, or partially handwaved off in a cutscene. Not so in First Light, which unfolds much more like a prestige TV series than a film. While I’ll stress vehemently that this is absolutely the last thing I’d want from current screen rights owner Amazon when it comes to Bond’s live-action future, for First Light’s purposes it works splendidly. It feels perfectly suited to sit back and play, say, a chapter at a time. There are 17 overall, and it took me around 18 hours to reach the end without rushing too much. The writing is excellent, blending a world of serious consequences with a steady supply of on-brand one-liners. The music is impeccable, too; a masterclass of restraint that sensibly limits the use of Bond’s iconic musical stinger to major moments, meaning I got chills each time it occurred.

The chapters are lengthy and rich with peripheral detail to explore, and this significantly bolsters First Light’s ability to build a world I can feel properly immersed in. The pace of both the action and the story is excellent, crescendoing brilliantly in its final act as the stakes explode (along with everything else) and IO takes a moment to fulfill one last Bond fantasy I’d feared it may have forgotten.

While I always felt properly propelled along, I have enjoyed the fact that – beyond a few time sensitive sequences and chases – First Light is more than happy to let you linger and absorb the detail. This is great as, since the world around Bond has been so thoughtfully and convincingly fleshed out, I found it largely impossible to blitz through. Whether it’s Bond’s London apartment, or the bustling MI6 headquarters packed with staffers, the iconic secret agent is seated in a believable world that doesn’t fall to pieces the second you try to scrutinize it. As a Bond fan, it’s delightfully immersive, and Easter eggs abound. You try moving through Q-Lab without pressing every button. Q’s helpless lackeys aren’t going to temporarily blind themselves, after all.

Perhaps above everything, I just adore the attention to detail – from the big-picture consideration of giving Bond the long, vertical scar on his right cheek the character boasted in his literary origins, to tiny embellishments like the scratched rims and ziptied trim on the busted-up, 2006 Aston Martin that acts as a test mule at MI6’s Malta-based training camp. If you don’t walk around and ogle it like I did, this car only spends about a minute or two on screen during the chapter. Yet the fact that IO saw fit to weather, damage, and field repair it like a teenager’s taped-up, track-day drift toy speaks volumes about where the studio set the bar for the level of authenticity it wanted to capture here – and I love that. Aston Martin is here with multiple models, as is Jaguar, Land Rover, and Triumph, and that’s meaningful. It doesn’t feel cynical; Bond is a British institution, and First Light surrounds him with others.

First Light is in rare air in this regard; it’s a licensed game built with an obsessive desire to faithfully bring an existing property to life. As its own take, it’s on a slightly different track to famously brilliant movie tie-ins like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Warriors, or even RoboCop: Rogue City – but IO’s commitment is the same. There are too many seamlessly embedded references to moments from various Bond films to argue that the movies aren’t at the bedrock of what the studio has built here.

First Light’s pace also allows us to marinate with these new riffs on the characters for a lot longer, which helps immensely. There’s no doubt that coming out of the gate with such a young version of Bond was a risk. Irish actor Patrick Gibson’s portrayal of a Bond in his late 20s – and brand new to the world of international espionage – is not initially the one we know. He’s an archetypal hotshot, cocky and inexperienced. He’s a successfully suave ladies man already, but encumbered with a little too much misplaced confidence elsewhere. However, this gives Gibson’s Bond room to grow as he becomes a product of all the new role models he’s suddenly found himself surrounded by.

These include Q (whose patient and more fatherly attitude makes sense in this context, because it now leaves room for him to potentially become a little more hilariously exasperated as Bond continues to break or lose everything he ever gives him) and Bond’s training mentor John Greenway (ably portrayed by British actor Lennie James in a similarly strong performance). The upshot here is that the Bond we get by the end is the patriotic, heroic, and appropriately horny man of mystery we’re very familiar with, but watching him get there was something we’d never seen before.

With IO Interactive being the home of the Hitman series since its inception way back in the year 2000, First Light admittedly shares some very obvious DNA with its bald-and-barcoded stablemate. Running on the studio’s in-house engine, the look and feel are immediately familiar to me as a veteran player of the Hitman series. For the most part, this is a strength; Bond feels weighty and grounded as he smoothly moves, climbs, and vaults around, and First Light typically looks quite fabulous, from its crowded clubs to its wide-open natural spaces. Playing on a standard PS5, there were occasions where I found myself staring at a texture that seemed far murkier than it ought to be at such close proximity, but it’s otherwise sharp and packed with fine, granular detail.

The sandbox nature of Hitman’s level design is also here to a certain extent, albeit in the more managed fashion of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. That is, First Light stitches together open areas that have multiple approaches with linear sequences you need to play the way the developers dictate.

There are levels here with large, crowded areas akin to those like the Paris fashion show in 2016’s Hitman, or the German nightclub in 2021’s Hitman 3, while other sections are a little more adjacent to something like the Uncharted series. The latter sequences are occasionally guilty of limitations that look a little silly in practice – like Bond’s inability to clamber up a small, rocky slope or duck under a waist-high booby-trap string. However, this is the kind of seam you can typically pick at in even the best third-person shooters in the business.

First Light also repurposes a lot of Hitman’s distraction-based sneaking. For instance, you can still turn on loud items and such to lure guards from their posts – only in this case it’s something Bond can do from afar thanks to the embrace of gadgets. Gadgets are obviously a core component of the 007 fantasy, and First Light features an array of them (my favourites are the laser and the missile pen). The only thing that gives me pause is IO’s solution to restrain their use. Gadgets are a consumable, so there’s a requirement to shuffle around and gather up battery power from loose phones, and replenish your chemical supply by scooping up gobs of hand sanitizer. The fact that there’s always so much of this stuff laying around means gathering it is just an arbitrary task, which arguably could’ve been easily replaced by a cooldown timer.

At any rate, I should note that this isn’t simply Agent 47 by way of His Majesty’s Secret Service, and there are a bunch of bespoke tweaks here that imbue First Light with its own, very distinctly Bond-branded flourishes. His abilities as a brawler put 47’s to shame, and there’s a layered system of dodges, counters, and satisfyingly devastating environment attacks. Melee combat is perhaps a little clunky at times, particularly when Bond finds himself swarmed, but it is nonetheless a major distinction from the Hitman series.

First Light is also far more suited for run-and-gun shooting. I initially found the shooting a little clumsy – and did find myself wondering about the worth of a mechanic that allows Bond to toss an empty gun right at the face of the nearest goon. Eventually, however, I almost started to relish running out of ammo, hurling an SMG like an oversized shuriken into some hapless bloke’s head and snatching his own weapon. The times I got it right, which increased the more accustomed to the action I got, were incredibly satisfying.

For clarity, there are also parts of the Hitman formula that haven’t crossed over into First Light’s universe. Disguises, for instance, are limited to only when they’re scripted necessities for the story, and Bond can’t hide or drag the bodies of guards he’s knocked out – which does leave the stealth feeling a little archaic in 2026. I’ll certainly concede that the idea of James Bond collecting a big pile of corpses doesn’t pass the sniff test, but it would’ve been nice to be able to at least yank a knocked-out bad guy behind cover in order to allow me to remain undetected a little longer.

If you’re a fan of life simulators, you’ve no doubt heard critics, developers, influencers, and all manner of social media-savvy people wax lyrical about the complexity of creating a compelling social simulation. As I said in my own inZoi review last year, curating a world that’s both representative of the murky mess that is being human and enjoyable to play is a seemingly impossible undertaking that few have managed. And yet, after spending 35 hours in Paralives crafting families, building homes, and sowing discord among residents, I have a renewed hope. This ambitious challenger to The Sims’ throne has captured not only the practical elements of humanity but, importantly, the weird ones we sweep under the rug, too. While its Early Access start has a lot of room to grow before it slays the reigning king of the genre, it’s certainly on its way.

Your time in Paralives begins on a train, with a quick tutorial for how to handpick the actions of the Parafolk (the name Paralives gives to its digital citizens) as God of this world. You’ll initially do so with predesigned families, including the father-son duo of the ​​Marquez household, who hide secrets beneath their chirpy veneer, and the party-loving trio from the Wolf household, who need to get it together if they want to pay the bills. These families all feel thoughtfully written and have their own issues to connect with, which is a boon for people who prefer a rich backstory to bounce off. But if you’d rather get straight into the nitty-gritty of people pottery like me, you can also create your own household via the Paramaker mode right away.

Comparable in layout to The Sims 4’s Create-a-Sim, the Paramaker mode splits avatar creation into three main sections: Appearance, Clothing, and Personality. From here, you can curate the look of your digital person through a selection of pre-fab facial and body features, dress them in stylish garb, and finally choose what kind of digi-person they will be with various traits. There is also the option to fine-tune your creation by using your mouse to tug and drag at anchor points to twist up their features like putty. It’s a reactive and rewarding process, particularly if you’re working from a reference photo.

There aren’t a great deal of options for customisation just yet, though it’s clear there’s been a particular effort made to replicate the diversity of the real world with what’s available. Hair presets span a variety of textures, including straight, wavy, curly, and coily, plus there’s an option to select hearing aids and prosthetic legs. What’s more, you can layer items like piercings, jewellery, and tattoos to really amp up your character’s personality. This blend of options safeguards your households from the cursed same-face syndrome, and ensures that every person you meet out in the world doesn't look like they're all related either. Clothing, too, has a decent variety and caters to a range of styles from goth to coquette, even including a full-body morph suit – to each their own.

No matter what you pick, Paralives' standout art style evokes the nostalgia of classic Telltale games like The Wolf Among Us. This dynamic comic book approach is not only easy on the eyes, it also helps details like wrinkles, facial hair, and eyelashes really pop. That’s particularly true as your Parafolk emote and perform actions like cooking or scrolling on their phone while ignoring their chores – they’re just like me, for real! By leaning away from the hyperreal and toward the more cartoonish aspects of humanity, Parafolks feel slightly goofier and a lot more likeable than the people of their competitors, conjuring favourable comparisons to The Sims 2. In this way, I found myself connected to their plights more so than the undeniably trendy but slightly soulless inhabitants of Krafton’s InZOI.

Unfortunately, the wheels start to fall off in the Personality section of character creation, which feels quite limited at the moment. You’ll give every Parafolk a Vibe, a Social Perk, and a Talent area, each of which is intended to influence how they move through the world. For example, if you choose the “Good at taking care of other people” Social Perk, that character can make chicken soup for sick friends. Alternatively, if you pick the Gloomy option for their Vibe, they will be happiest when in a bad mood. As you play out their life, you’ll unlock more slots to fill, though these choices don't translate clearly into practical gameplay. And, frustratingly, even with drastically different personalities, most of my households reacted more or less the same to major incidents.

Rounding out the start of each new family, you’ll also need to choose a specific Storyteller, which is a unique mechanic that will dictate the difficulty of your day-to-day life. Storytellers dole out cards every dawn that cause random events to happen in the lives of your Parafolk. One day, you might get a free computer from work. Another day, one of your household members may be encouraged to cheat on their spouse. This system adds much-needed entropy to your household's otherwise routine shenanigans. While many of the prompts seemed repetitive in concept, I found them to be effective in practice — they do well to keep things fresh in the long term, which is one of the biggest bugbears of the genre.

Once you have your household, the next step is to find a home, which once again gives you the choice between a pre-designed estate or an empty block with a budget to spend on all the essential amenities, like beds, baths, and beyond. Similar to the Paramaker, Paralives' build mode currently has a fairly limited pool of items and options, but there's at least enough customisability here to keep you busy building for hours on end.

In construction mode, you erect walls, add windows and doors, and then decorate the space with a selection of modern interior options. It’s an approachable process, thanks in part to a togglable snap tool that ensures your architecture is balanced and beautiful. Still, cowboy builders need not worry as there’s plenty of room to get weird with it, too, and Paralives isn’t keen to hold you to any building code. When renovating your space, you can place items almost anywhere you’d like. As a huge fan of cosy, cluttered spaces, I squeaked with joy when I realised I could stack ramen cups on top of kitchen fridges and select random throw pillows to jazz up plain couches. Yuckier touches like mould, damp, and body hair can also be dotted around for the sickos out there, with Paralives allowing you to make a truly bespoke, if totally gross, living space.

This customisation is a double-edged sword, though – while beautiful, much of the world isn’t actually interactable. Those ramen noodles might create a cool vibe, but they can never be eaten, and the cosy throw pillows will never crumple under the weight of a sleepy character, which feels like a missed opportunity. Such aesthetically pleasing but useless items also crop up in the open world and inevitably lead to deflating moments as you realise you can walk through a moving train completely unscathed. There has been an effort to provide the background city with a sense of liveliness through a daily newspaper and rotation of activities like run clubs and BBQs. Even so, these events can feel rather flat, with locals milling around as if on a timer. As such, Paralives' setting doesn’t feel like an entirely cohesive society just yet.

Moment-to-moment survival comes down to meeting a few basic needs: Hygiene, Hunger, Sleep, and the Toilet. Achieving these needs is a constant uphill battle, though failing them so badly that you die isn’t so easy either. As with real life, Parafolks' days are split between working a job that pays the bills, toying around with home appliances, and chatting with the locals to try and make friends. The way you progress is fairly rudimentary; you’ll often be stuck reading a book to level up skills or waiting out the in-game clock for a work shift to end. Thankfully, there is some reprieve in the socialising portion, with Paralives opting for a refreshingly alternate approach.

Instead of selecting another character and choosing a conversation topic, you’ll need the Parafolk to interact long enough to fill a conversation meter. From there, you’ll have a small pool of subjects to choose from, which includes asking other Parafolk if they’re single in a flirtatious way, telling jokes, and chatting about general life events. At first, I didn’t love this radical style, but it grew on me over my play sessions, and I eventually realised how handy this hands-off approach was. Instead of sitting with one of my household members, clicking topics on repeat, I could move on to another task or person while they were schmoozing, and periodically jump in to keep the conversation flowing. Like spinning personality plates, I could lock in as one started to wobble, before jumping over to another conversation to keep that one in play, too.

Alas, not even expert helicopter parents like me can keep everything in check, and across my time with Paralives, I fell prey to the inevitable chaos of an Early Access life simulator. One day, during some routine cupcake-baking, my house burned down because the firefighters kept spawning just outside my front door without being able to step through it, as if they were mocking me. Soon after, another of my households got stuck in some kind of viral loop, circulating a sickness through the entire family, like a never-ending, festering plague. During this time, they all had to take turns running back and forth between their beds and the home’s single toilet – no prizes for guessing how that shook out.

Such unfortunate occurrences might seem like frustrating, gameplay-halting events that make you want to ragequit. But its spirited art direction and goofy charms manage to make these scenarios feel funny and endearing to experience, as if they were intentional. Where the day-to-day activities lacked the depth to keep me entertained, these scrappy edges showcased more of the rich, chaotic personality that bleeds through all aspects of Paralives, and makes it stand out as a worthwhile contender amongst its more substantial and established peers in the genre.

I wouldn't normally trust budget Bluetooth earbuds for serious gaming: the audio delay is always distracting, especially in fast-paced shooters. Instead I rely on dedicated gaming earbuds that connect to low-latency 2.4Ghz wireless dongles.

But Bluetooth earbuds with "gaming modes" – which cut latency without the dongle – are improving. I recently reviewed the capable $100 EarFun Air Pro 4 Plus and now I've tested the even-cheaper 1More Q21 buds. They're the only $40 earbuds I've tested with a dedicated gaming mode, and the Chinese brand is known for outperforming its price on sound and comfort.

Properly Good Buds for Intense Gaming

A low-latency gaming mode in buds this cheap is a novelty. As with other Bluetooth buds you'll need to connect to your phone and PC or handheld console simultaneously using dual connection – another rarity on budget buds – then toggle gaming mode on your phone app before booting up a game. It worked for me every time.

It's a dramatic difference. It doesn't cut the latency of Bluetooth entirely but it's close enough that after a few minutes I stopped noticing, and the sound felt instant even in a twitchy shooter like Marathon.

They can't match gaming buds with a 2.4Ghz dongle, but they're a fraction of the price. I could play it without any latency hampering me – for $40, that's a win. The effect is similar to the more expensive Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus, which, as I said in my review, has one of the best gaming modes I've tried.

The audio impressed me too. In Marathon I could hear footsteps and the direction they were coming from, and easily tell guns apart by their sound effects. Marathon is a stern test – in more casual games like Dishonored 2, every sound felt loud, clear, and detailed, from the slash of a knife and muffled screams of an enemy to the blare of an alarm.

They also never dropped their connection, which can sometimes be a problem with gaming modes.

That said, they lack the precision of mid- or high-end buds. When Marathon's footsteps, gunshots, atmospheric wind and explosions roared all at once, everything blended together and it was hard to tell where individual sounds were coming from. But I can easily forgive that at this price, and 90% of the time it wasn't a problem.

Away from gaming their sound is bright and bouncy: I enjoyed listening to both music and podcasts. The bass lacks some punch, making Skepta's Shutdown feel limper than it should, and they can sound a little-washed and airy on complex tracks such as The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony.

You'll notice a big difference if you're used to expensive earbuds – but they still sound better than I'd expect for the price and they even support the LDAC Bluetooth codec for extra clarity, if your phone can handle it (at the moment, iPhones can't).

Light and Comfortable, but Below-Par Battery

Both the buds and case are simple, light, and compact.

The case slides into my pocket without bulging and while the coating feels pretty cheap, the hinge is sturdy. I bashed it and dropped it without any damage.

Each bud is slim and weighs just over 4g – lighter than most, and the oval-shaped rubber tips felt comfortable enough to wear for several hours at a time. They wobbled a bit when I ran at the gym but stayed in my ears and handled sweat (they're IPX5 certified, meaning they're water resistant).

Comfort won't cut your gaming sessions short, but the battery might.

1More advertises 5.5 hours of runtime without active noise cancelling (ANC), slightly below average for earbuds. That falls to 4 hours with ANC and drops further if you're using dual connection and playing games: I was hitting roughly four hours on gaming mode without ANC. Meanwhile, the case has a 600mAh capacity, which will recharge the buds roughly four times before needing to be plugged in.

It's not ideal, but you're always going to compromise with budget buds and they'll still last long enough to see you through a medium-length flight, a long commute, or an extended gaming session.

Decent ANC and Simple Software

The Q21's ANC and transparency modes are decent for the price.

The ANC cut out conversations in a cafe so I could concentrate on work but it couldn't shut out the rattle of the London Underground, which overwhelmed the podcast I was trying to listen to.

I find transparency modes to be almost universally rubbish because the sound they let in is usually drowned out by whatever I'm listening to. It's the same here: when I was playing a game I couldn't hear my wife talking from a few metres away, but I could hear the doorbell if it rang, and I could stay aware of traffic when I walked down my local high street listening to music.

Both settings live within 1More's app. The basics work but it's barebones beyond that. You can, for example, only choose between six preset EQs to tune your sound and you can't create your own.

Some of the settings are confusingly categorized. Gaming mode lives under "shortcuts", for some reason, and there's separate "settings" and "custom settings" tabs. Opening settings gives you three more categories to choose from. It's a bit messy.

But once I learned how to toggle gaming mode and dual connection, I never had any issue navigating the app and it instantly recognised the buds every time I opened it.

Samuel is a freelance reporter and editor specializing in longform journalism and hardware reviews. You can read his work at his website.

After the opening hour of Mina the Hollower, I found myself dropped into a hostile world with no obviously “correct” path to follow and roaming enemies that could kill me in just a few hits no matter what direction I chose. That’s about when I realized this retro RPG was hiding far more than I expected beneath the surface – and once I burrowed on in, I never wanted to come back up. Mina is a tough-as-nails adventure gorgeously done up in the style of the Game Boy Color’s best, and it isn’t shy about those influences. It borrows The Legend of Zelda’s open-world structure, adds a healthy amount of Castlevania’s horror setting and haunting chiptunes, and peps things up with a surprising dose of FromSoft’s Souls games in its combat and progression. But somewhere in that mix, Mina becomes more than the sum of those parts, cleverly riffing and remixing them them with consistent brilliance. Its blocky exterior disguises rich combat systems, some of the best puzzle solving ever put to screen, and a funny, deeply weird world I loved to explore.

Developer Yacht Club Games is no stranger to retro tributes, with its standout Shovel Knight series drawing heavily from NES classics like Mega Man. While Shovel Knight stuck to its source material pretty closely, Mina uses Zelda games like Link’s Awakening and the Oracle duo as a foundation for a much deeper, more modern take on a top-down action-RPG: You have a jump that will get you over small gaps but never up to a higher ledge, an overworld that partially scrolls but has distinct edges between regions, and of course start out with a stubby little weapon (actually, several to choose from). These are not the Zelda games you usually see developers aim their sights at, but I love how the seemingly-limiting constraints of imitating the early handheld Zeldas conceals Mina’s inner complexity.

However, very much unlike the Game Boy games it draws from aesthetically, and more like The Legend of Zelda for NES (or Breath of the Wild decades later), Mina has a completely open world. There are no paths blocked until you get some special item, and nothing but your own skill level keeping you from going to any one of its four initial dungeons first. You just need to fight your way there. And if you can’t cut it, there’s probably another area to try instead, a clever place to grind for money and levels, or some side quests that lead to optional upgrades.

Mina’s world is often surreal, dreamy, and uncanny. Built around the central village of Ossex, the Tenebrous Isles are an entrancing mix of gothic fantasy and magically-infused steampunk tech. There are plenty of adorable animal denizens, like Mina, but also building-busting giants, perfectly friendly abominations, and a whole lotta possums – which are a type of monster. Cutesy overworld sprites are sometimes subverted by ghoulish character portraits when you stop to chat. It all smacks of the David Lynch-inspired characters that make up the otherworldly island of Link’s Awakening in just the right way (and that’s not some snooty art school connection I’m making, Twin Peaks has been widely cited by the devs as a major influence on that 1993 Zelda game). Additionally, these characters all have lives that are affected by your actions, and many end up holding a greater purpose in the larger story, which has some fun (if predictable) twists and turns, but really saves the good stuff for the end.

Mina herself is a bit of an enigma. She’s a monster slayer, but also something of a mad scientist who has outfitted Tenebrous Isles with tech that is being mysteriously sabotaged. The plot follows whether her machines are actually good or bad, and while brave little Mina seems to act heroically in this kill-or-be-killed overworld, often solving problems for the Islefolk, she also causes a few: Without spoiling anything, those can come back to haunt you. This little white mouse explores a lot of grey areas, and I love that!

Dungeon Hollower

There are six main dungeons spread across the Tenebrous Isles, each with a matching area that leads up to it – a swamp, a beach, a crypt… you’ve played a video game before. There’s even a small but very cool nod to Castlevania here, with short establishing shots showing the boss towers silhouetted in the distance for every area – and then those creepy spires showing up in backgrounds as you climb, just like Dracula’s perched lair. While most of Mina’s art choices are limited to blocky tiles, these sweeping scenes and backdrops show off some stunning pixel art that helps set the mood.

(And then there’s the soundtrack: Pure Castlevania! Baroque jams performed on a glorious, beepy boopy NES/Game Boy soundalike instrument set. I’ve been associating this sort of gothic Casio sound with tense horror action games since 1987 and it still feels totally rad when executed this well in 2026.)

All six areas are filled with charm and challenge, but one called Septemberg especially stood out as a piece of storytelling I’d never experienced before. It’s a region frozen in autumn, with gusty winds that blow you around, piles of fallen leaves, pumpkins, and a general Halloween vibe. All of it is out to kill you. You quickly learn of a lurking terror in your midst there, and the escalating nightmare of trying to manage that threat through a hedge maze, a lightning storm, and more is an absolutely bonkers, adrenaline-inducing sequence I couldn’t stop talking about with others who had seen it; just an incredible amalgam of schlocky, spooky-season fun.

While you could go to Septemberg as your first area or not find it until much later, there are areas you can’t access immediately, but the way to reach them is never a dungeon-based upgrade. It’s a secret passage, a side quest, or, in some cases, by using a specific Sidearm (secondary weapon) or Trinket (ability-modifying equipment) that you find while exploring the overworld. This is the best and most pure kind of open world, and it’s executed excellently here. Mina dangles a prize just out of reach to challenge you: Can you get to that treasure chest from another screen? Can you survive long enough in the water to reach that gap under a bridge? Should you go in that creepy hole in the ground right now with no save point in sight?

Mina’s move set as you meet these challenges is all her own, and it is a ton of fun to learn and master as you explore. Her ability to burrow beneath the ground and then pop up for an aerial leap is multipurpose: It’s a dash, a dodge, a long jump, and eventually a graceful way to dance around an enemy like a furry lil’ ninja. There’s a learning curve for sure, and effectively working this move into my hacking and slashing took time. There are no counters or dodge rolls here, just sliding under an enemy to get the better of them. But once I got the hang of burrowing, it became a versatile combat tool that made Mina feel extra nimble compared to, say, a certain squat, little Hylian.

Morsel Combat

There are two other aspects of Mina’s arsenal that will surely catch Castlevania fans’ eyes – and ears – right away. First off, the whip: Mina’s Nightstar (actually described as a mace on a chain) is one of five possible weapons to pick from, and it’s a fantastic go-to option (and, of course, any aspiring Belmont’s choice of weapon). I stuck with the Nightstar for most of the roughly two-dozen hours it took me to reach the credits, but I ended up also falling in love with the daggers, Whisper and Vesper – more of an Alucard thing. The Nightstar is good for delivering fast, heavy damage at a safe distance (and you can upgrade it to do the useless, dangling chain thing, ala Castlevania IV!). But the daggers, when boosted by a Trinket that adds an attack multiplier for landing hits without missing, became an awesome boss killer.

The other system ripped straight out of Castlevania are the Sidearms, which give you a variety of secondary attacks depending on which Sidearm pickup you grabbed last (all of which are in predictable locations you can remember to return to). Options like the sword and axe function almost exactly like sub weapons in Castlevania, and are even replenished the same way, with a resource called Joules that is spent each time you use one (just like so many Hearts in classic Castlevanias). There are some weird Sidearms, though, like the Iron Steed – a bicycle with a sort of jousting rod attached that serves both as a quick option to dash around and a way to jump over huge gaps to reach secret areas. Other Sidearms I liked were a little ghost that attacked enemies and drained Joules over time, and a demon pet on a leash that acts as your own personal Chain Chomp.

You can augment most of Mina’s moves through swappable Trinkets, which provide buffs that boost your movement, attack, or defense in helpful and sometimes wacky ways. I was able to expand my Trinket slots to activate five at once, and my preferred combos for exploration (long jumps, increased burrowing time, wall grabs) were very different than those for combat (DPS multipliers, a revive, health extenders). For instance, one Trinket allowed me to float slowly down after a jump, and that became essential to how I moved through this world – but it was useless in most boss battles, so I’d replace it with an attack buff that shocked enemies at the save room right before a big fight. There are dozens of trinkets to find – some extremely useful on their own, and others that only add up to huge results when used together. Unlike many games where I tend to stick to a formula I find that works, I was always excited to experiment in Mina.

The Bones Are Their Money

The other way to upgrade yourself brings us to Mina’s third major influence: FromSoft heavy-hitters like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The “Souls” currency equivalent here are Bones, and they serve the exact same purpose: Experience points gained from both combat and exploration that you must either spend or risk losing upon death. Mina isn’t nearly as punishing, however, as you can quickly gain multiple Sparks that will prevent you from losing your Bones on death, getting stuck inside the enemy that killed you or in the room where you died until you can recover them. This leads to a loop familiar to Souls players that’s just as hard to resist here: Do you delve deeper on this outing, getting more Bones and items, or do you run back to the nearest save point and “Bone Up” first?

Boning Up allows you to spend an escalating amount of Bones to level up either your main weapon attack, defense, or Sidearm attack, with a fourth option to store the Bones for safekeeping in a “savings account” of sorts, which is impervious to death. I found that going all in on attack was the best bet early, and did a fair amount of grinding to do so.

Finding grinding spots proved a major component of Mina, which I had a lot of fun with in the late game especially. It was cool to feel slightly OP at times if I found a really good spot, though that does mean pushing through the already tough intro first. Dumped into the open world after the on-rails opening area, you are nudged in the direction of the Crypt to the east of Ossex as your first dungeon, but the path there is really, really hard at starting levels. Once I hit an area with a particularly invincible-feeling set of knight enemies, I was caught a bit off guard by Mina’s difficulty curve. But fear not: This first hurdle is also the biggest, and it can be solved simply by spending some time to level up your attack, maybe some defense, and look for secrets.

This is because Mina starts to throw a lot more Trinkets at you, as well as opportunities to score Bones naturally as you explore. In this way, Mina, which is a very hard game, sets itself apart from another recent 2D action game notorious for toughness: Hollow Knight: Silksong. In Silksong, your primary options are usually to “get good” or just go somewhere else. There are items and upgrades to find, but grinding just to level up your stats doesn’t exist, and that limitation made that particular Metroidvania-with-bugs feel less open than something like a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

In contrast, Mina let me solve difficulty checks like bosses in multiple ways, which I appreciated a lot. You can certainly learn a tricky boss’s patterns, or you can grind for Bones to up your attack and then absolutely roll it. Alternatively, you could play with your Trinket build until you find some combo that makes that particular boss a breeze. All of these upgrades really matter: Enemies that take 10 hits could take half that after a Bone Up, and then half that again, so just finding a clever grinding spot can make things much easier. Crucially, that grinding feels perfectly tuned to allow for multiple playstyles, not like a slog you are forced into.

Souls-Tyke

Your healing and life bar also owe a debt to Dark Souls, but there’s a really fun and twisted… twist to it. You have a stock of health potions called Plasma Vials, but you can only replenish your health bar if you attack enemies. Each hit you land fills in the missing section of your bar with a yellow part called Plasma, and that Plasma can then be converted into good old fashioned red health when you use a Vial. So that means if you are getting low on health, you have to go on offense. There are a few environmental items that can help you heal, and Trinkets can once again play with Vials and Plasma in cool ways, but the core healing system presents an amusing gamble that I ended up loving – and making plenty of wrong bets on.

Of course, every Souls-inspired game also has its version of a save point that both heals you and restores all the enemies to the world. Mina’s is cute and clever: A tiny “Underlab” specific spots let you burrow down to where you can use stored Bones to level up, swap Trinkets, and change weapons. The main loop of Mina becomes centered largely on whether or not you can make it to (or find) the next Underlab, or whether you should retreat to the last one you visited. This sets up that ultra-tense, risk-vs.-reward version of exploration that makes so many games so appealing and hard to put down, from Resident Evil to Metroid. After each successful outing, you’ll think, “Just one more try – at least I know where the enemies are now!” A neat twist to Mina’s Underlab is that you can outfit it with things like a way to store Sidearms, replenish your Joules, and even look at a rudimentary map that tracks collectibles by region.

Speaking of maps, Mina does not have a detailed, room-by-room one to pore over for secrets. While this makes it a lot more like Dark Souls and Bloodborne in terms of the sheer, terrifying unknown of what’s ahead, it cuts out Zelda, Metroid, or Castlevania’s ability to constantly probe the edges of a pause-screen map to sniff out some collectible hidden past a breakable wall. There are plenty of secrets out there; you just have to probe every element of a room in order to find them. This helped me focus on the combat, platforming, and survival, which I did appreciate, but filling out a map is one of my favorite activities in any game. However, I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would since it significantly ups the challenge of finding secrets in a fun way. (And over at IGN Guides, you know we are hard at work on a map, so you will have an option I didn’t!)

Small Wonder

A game with so many disparate influences like this always runs the risk of becoming a mishmashed hodgepodge, but Mina’s inspirations are all awesome choices that mix well together. The result is a sort of Breath of the Wild moment for top-down adventure games: Mina takes a bunch of ideas found in the most popular open-world games of the modern era and squishes them into the ‘90s Zelda mold. What comes out is a game Nintendo would be too scared to make, FromSoft has already tried, and Konami gave up on for two decades.

And despite being so referential, Mina is actually quite unpredictable, and frequently plays up the element of surprise. These surprises can be small: A giant hand pulls you into a shop; some creep just shows up in your Underlab; a freaky clown jump scares you only to tell a dad joke. Or they can be really big. While I obviously won’t spoil anything here, Mina’s triumphant ending is its biggest surprise of all. It may set up more questions than answers, but this conclusion and the run up to it is undoubtedly one for the books, full of excellent twists I didn’t see coming. And darkness – “Tenebrous Isles” is accurate. Look it up.

To get to that ending takes a while, too. After 23 hours, I rolled credits with 72% completion and immediately started into New Game+ to find all the stuff I didn’t the first time around. Those 23 hours were more than enough for me to fall head over heels for Mina, but there’s a lot more, too. You can go for 100% completion within your original save thanks to a clearly labeled point of no return – but what’s interesting is that, since your completion rate and all the treasure you’ve found will carry over into New Game+, you can continue to chip away at that 100% goal in your new save as well. Returning to boss fights with all your gear or noticing that crack in a wall you forgot to delve into the first time around is a blast. I’ve never played a game that allows you to do a second playthrough with a bunch of chests sitting there open, while others remain undiscovered. It’s extremely cool.

On top of that, each New Game+ through the seventh run has unique permutations: The initial version I’m on now has far fewer save spots, making runbacks an absolute killer (which, blissfully, is not a concern at all in the base playthrough). And for you oldschool cheat code fans, there’s a massive menu of modifications to turn on and off, which range from goofy to helpful. You can even toggle on a sort of "God mode" for when you get stuck – just remember that this disables the “Feats” (achievements) system. I left it alone for that reason, but started a new save up just to mess around with it, and it’s fantastic for making Mina more accessible.

It’s one thing to go from the small to the big screen, but it’s a whole other thing to do it with a built-in fanbase ready to devour whatever comes next. The reputation of the Backrooms precedes it, and with good reason, but now the question is: Can the A24-backed feature film live up to the promise of Kane Parsons’ original YouTube series? Thankfully, I’m here to tell you that the filmmaker has without a doubt got the stuff, with instincts far beyond that of a budding 20-year-old artist. Parsons already had four years of crafting this story under his belt, and that has turned him into a young master, with this story growing into a liminal masterpiece. Backrooms is a truly terrifying cinematic rabbit hole that takes its audience down a twisted and dread-filled path as cerebral in its horror as it is aesthetically pleasing in its design.

The movie focuses on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, who finds an entrance to the Backrooms (via what fans will know as a null zone) in a wall in the basement of his furniture store. The scene is set immediately: This place is dangerous, terrifying, and we shouldn’t want to explore it. Parsons’ debut captures that unsettling feeling from the very start as opposed to maybe letting the audience marvel at the, well, marvel of the setting as an introduction to the concept. The sinister tone carries on throughout the film, with the heightened presence of the Backrooms themselves, much like any predator, feeling as though the walls are breathing as they stake out and track their prey.

Interestingly enough, though, that ominous and threatening tone isn’t only bolstered by the film’s evil central locale. Ejiofor’s Clark is a troubled and bitter man consumed by resentment, and his hatred infects the film just as much as the sickly yellow, moldy walls do. This is the first time you don’t care about a central character stuck in Parsons’ Backrooms — there have been several there prior to the events of the film — and it actually works to the movie’s advantage. It's an interesting way for Parsons to revisit the world by giving us an irredeemable character’s perspective of what it means to exist inside it. Most viewers probably aren’t going to like that, and some will find an off-ramp from the entire thing because of it, but those of us who have spent time within this world will recognize the choice for what it is: a reflection of the reality that the Complex (as it’s known in the YouTube series) doesn’t discriminate. That truth — the notion that truly anyone is subject to the worst the Backrooms have to offer — is a terrifying prospect in and of itself.

The production design of this film, in a word, rocks. The Complex itself is stunning, and feels even more unsettling as a life-sized set, which hardly seems possible when Parsons is so good at building it virtually in Blender. That said, the Blender sequences — and there are several in the film for fans hoping that style would make its way to the big screen — do so much to anchor the movie’s horror foundation in a threat that feels both so far yet so close to our reality. They smartly reinforce the film’s ’90s timeline with a gritty shot-on-video texture that builds a layer of realism before becoming a vehicle to ramp up the horror elements to the max. Paired with smart camera angles and an innate sense of comfortability in crafting compelling images, Parsons shapes a visual language for the world of the Backrooms that feels both homey and horrifying in equal measure.

Parsons does an excellent job of playing to both sides with this film — those who know nothing about the Backrooms and its lore, and those who have an intimate knowledge of the groundwork Parsons started laying in 2022, so there’s plenty of story and lore to get their teeth into. There are tons of excellent intricate connections to the story Parsons began crafting in the web series, which is undoubtedly exciting for fans of the expanse of that groundwork. Like he’s done in the series by weaving in the technological bureaucracy of the Async Research Institute and the stories of real people noclipping into the nightmare world of the Backrooms, the film laces together the scientific side of the lore and the reality that comes with someone randomly entering this twisted endless world. How does that ordeal permanently alter that person’s psyche? Their relationship to memory? Their proximity to loneliness? It’s more than enough to satisfy existing fans, especially ones who are excited by Parsons continuing to build upon the world he’s working in, but it’s also absolutely intriguing enough to hook people with no experience in the overall concept.

That said, it doesn’t hold the hands of newcomers getting immersed in the world of the Backrooms for the first time. How the film goes about answering and not answering questions might end up being the most divisive part of its reception. By their nature, an audience will be receptive to answers handed to them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like to be or want to be challenged; in fact, many films in the mainstream these days don’t give their audiences that level of textual respect. But Parsons doesn’t just fill in the blanks for the sake of it, and he doesn’t give any details arbitrarily. Fans of his original series, like myself, will love that ambiguity and the promise of more discoveries to come. I’d like to think the greater viewership will see and appreciate that choice for what it is, but I fear easy viewing has placated us in recent years in a way that makes Parsons’ intentional gaps look like potholes and not details to uncover later. There’s so much potential for more here if you’re willing to let the story take you for the ride it wants you to go on, which means surrendering to the unknown until the narrative says otherwise; hopefully, audiences will be receptive to that vision.

Pressure opens in theaters on May 29.

Pressure focuses on the 72 hours leading up to D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 that ultimately paved the way for the downfall of the Nazis. You’ll never see a more important movie about weather forecasts than this well-crafted, solidly performed drama directed by Anthony Maras and based on David Haig’s 2014 play of the same name.

Pressure dramatizes the fateful choice that General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, must make when informed by meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) that massive storms may occur on the invasion’s planned date of June 5th. If the Allies delay D-Day too long, they will lose the element of surprise against the Germans and their best shot at winning the war. But if they go ahead with a massive seaborne invasion during such weather, they risk the whole operation failing and thousands of lives being needlessly lost.

Fraser finds Eisenhower’s vulnerabilities and flaws while maintaining his commanding presence. He cares deeply about his men, but can also be single-minded and demanding. The film also tenderly depicts the close bond between Ike and his chauffeur and personal secretary, Lt. Kay Summersby (a warm Kerry Condon), who acts as the gatekeeper to the general. They’re not a romantic item, mind you, so much as work spouses who know each other well enough to speak frankly.

As important as Fraser’s Eisenhower is to Pressure, the film’s main protagonist is Stagg, played by Scott as a brilliant but difficult man. Stagg’s softer side is really only evident to his pregnant wife before he leaves for duty at Southwick House, the rural English headquarters of Operation Overlord. (Batman Begins’ Wayne Manor, aka Mentmore Towers, stands in for the real location.)

Stagg is a stubborn but ultimately fair taskmaster who demands results from his team. He almost immediately clashes with his American counterpart, the humblebragging meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina), whom Ike has come to deeply trust thanks to their past campaigns. But Stagg and Krick have wildly different approaches to crafting a long-range forecast for D-Day. Stagg collects and analyzes a wide array of readings and data coming to him in real time; Krick relies on statistical analogue techniques that forecast based on historical patterns. Stagg believes the weather will be awful on June 5th while Krick insists it will be fine.

The brass do not want uncertainty from their meteorologists. Eisenhower and his military commanders, including General Bernard "Monty" Montgomery (a perfectly snide Damian Lewis, reuniting here with his Band of Brothers co-star Andrew Scott), are frustrated that there isn’t a unified recommendation. Monty and others believe if they don’t go on June 5th – and wait until mid-June as Stagg suggests – they may as well start learning to speak German.

Eisenhower, though, is haunted by the recent tragic failure of Exercise Tiger, a dress rehearsal for D-Day that resulted in hundreds of friendly fire deaths due to one simple error. He's aware that he himself has never seen combat – something Monty obnoxiously reminds him about – and knows that whatever his decision, the fate of the war rests with him. (Guess whose forecast Ike ends up going with?!)

Although the outcome of D-Day is known, Pressure successfully ratchets up tension by showcasing the uncertainty weighing on all of its characters. No one wants to be wrong, many big egos are weighing in, and the fate of the free world hangs in the balance. The film also introduces a very personal, ticking-clock crisis for Stagg that lends him much-needed vulnerability at a point where his behavior threatens to make him insufferable.

While Pressure is to be commended for its painstaking attention to detail in costuming and production design, there’s one notable area the film tries to pull off but just can’t quite succeed in. Act 3 admirably recreates the Normandy Beach landings to great effect, but it’s simply impossible for the film not to come up short when inevitably compared to the unsurpassable D-Day sequences in Saving Private Ryan. Still, not a bad runner-up