Author: News Polite

Update: Since the initial announcement, Nightmare Forge Game has denied claims that the game’s title is a Neo-Nazi reference, among other accusations. They have also renamed the game to Infestation: Origins. The original story continues below.

Nightmare Forge games has announced Infestation: Origins, a new 1-4 player survival horror co-op game that aims to infuse nostalgia with terror (in the vein of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey) by twisting the now-in-the-public-domain Steamboat Willie into something much scarier. It’s in development for PC.

The developers describe it as such: “In the year 1988, what was thought to be an outbreak of rodents in various locations morphed into something far more sinister.” Sometimes you’ll need to fight, sometimes you’ll need to run, and sometimes you’ll need to hide in a locker. You can set traps and utilize CCTV cameras to try and stay one step ahead of the infestation, and item layouts are randomized in order to help keep matches fresh. Check out the announcement trailer above and the first screenshots in the gallery below.

Nightmare Forge promises private and public lobbies, character customization, scaling enemy behavior, and DLSS support. If you’re interested, you can Infestation: Origins on Steam.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu has penned a New Year’s Letter that outlines some of his vision for the company, and it reveals it plans to “be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.”

These New Year’s Letters have become a staple of New Year’s Day recently, and previous ones have discussed the desire to explore NFTs, blockchain games, the metaverse, and more. This year, AI took a turn in the spotlight.

Kiryu began by talking about how AI and its “potential implications” have long been the subject of “academic debate.” However, he says, the rise of ChatGPT and similar generative AI programs have the “potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.”

In turn, Kiryu and Square Enix plan to be, as previously mentioned, “aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.”

“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts,” Kiryu continuted. “In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities. “

On the publishing front, Kiryu reveals the company wants to “enable greater global collaboration and to promote the shift to digital.” The team hopes this will allow them to not only gives them the chance to “maximize our sales of new titles, but also to deliver our rich back catalog to more customers and in turn to expand the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs).”

There is also a desire to put plans in place to ensure for easier and greater collaboration between the development and publishing teams at Square Enix in hopes this will make its “customers even happier than ever before.”

As for Blockchain, Kiryu added that Blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the Cloud are three of Square Enix’s main “focus investment fields,” and that it is “currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.”

Square Enix has a big year ahead of it, as fans will soon be able to enjoy Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy XVI’s second DLC, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, Foamstars, SaGa: Emerald Beyond, and Visions of Mana. While they don’t have dates, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, Dragon Quest XII, and Kingdom Hearts 4 are also on the way in 2024 or beyond.

You can read the full New Year’s Letter from Takashi Kiryu here.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

2023 was heralded as the biggest year in the history of video games to ever video game a game of videos, and as that incoherent word salad would suggest, it was a busy year. That said, 2024 is shaping up to have quite a few big releases to keep you from finishing that massive backlog you piled up last year because you were so busy tormenting Koroks and trying to get to second base with Shadowheart.

Before we get into it, note that video game release dates are about as reliable as weather forecasts at this point so it’s very possible, if not likely, that a few of these get delayed or otherwise moved around. Also, this is by no means a comprehensive list of everything coming out, just a handful of games we thought you’d like to have on your radar – if something you’re excited for didn’t make the cut, it’s nothing personal! If you want a more thorough roundup, every month we put up a new video detailing that month’s upcoming releases, so keep an eye out for that – the January one is already up.

If you’re sitting around checking your enchanted hourglass waiting on that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, good news! Ubisoft whipped up a nice 2.5D Metroidvania to hold you over. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown goes back to the series’ side-scrolling platformer roots, but with some modern twists. That’s it for basically everything released on January 18th.

On January 26th, hot on the heels of last year’s new installments of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, Tekken enters the fray with its eighth entry, which is putting those new-gen consoles through their paces and really showing what Unreal 5 can do. That’s on PS5, Xbox Series and PC.

That same day, on new- and last-gen, is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That’s an expensive way of saying Yakuza 8, though the series has officially rebranded to its Japanese name, kinda like how Dragon Quest was Dragon Warrior in the west for decades before finally making the switch. Anyway, notable Dragon Quest player Ichiban Kasuga returns for another wacky hero’s journey, and this time he’s brought along with semi-pro Pocket Circuit racer and UFO catcher enthusiast Kazuma Kiryu.

As you probably heard by now, the Arkham architects at Rocksteady are ditching the Dark Knight and trying their hand at a co-op looter-shooter starring Task Force X, better known as The Suicide Squad. The Squad’s mission? Kill the Justice League. The name of this game? The Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League. The release date? February 2nd, for new-gen and PC.

That same day, if you missed Persona 3 when it was on PS2 and then on PSP and later PS Vita, well, shame on you, but also good news because it’s been fully rebuilt as a new, modern console RPG, and it’s coming to everything but Switch… which is sad, because Switch is the closest thing we have anymore to a PSP or Vita.

The original Helldivers was a tough-as-nails, top-down co-op twin-stick shooter about zapping aliens on other planets, and the sequel takes the core gameplay loop but reinvents it from a third-person perspective, adding quite a bit of scale and complexity to missions, and wearing its Starship Troopers influence even more proudly on its sleeve. Would you like to know more? Well, it hits PS5 and PC on February 8th.

One game that has been in the works for a quite while is Skull and Bones. What began as a spin-off of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag’s naval combat has been delayed something like seven times. So pardon me if I’m skeptical that this game will actually come out on February 16th, but that’s what Ubisoft is saying this time. That’s on new-gen, PC and Amazon Luna.

On the 29th, Cloud, Tifa, Barrett and company are back, joined by quite a few familiar faces and turned loose in a massive, sprawling open-world and infinitely more detailed recreation of the original FF7’s overworld map, which you can travel around by chocobo or on a segway if you so desire. FF7 remake was an incredibly ambitious start and it sounds like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is going to be a substantially larger undertaking in all the best ways.

Homeworld 3 is the long overdue follow up to a beloved deep space strategy game released over 20 years ago. On March 8th, this franchise emerges from cryosleep on PC, so here’s hoping it can adapt to life in the 2020s.

On March 20th, one of the great-grandpappies of survival horror gets a new installment. At a glance, Alone in the Dark might seem like another remake along the lines of what Dead Space and Resident Evil did recently, but it’s being framed as a “revival” – which is fitting, given the southern gothic themes. It’s telling a new story, but longtime fans will likely get some deja vu as it’s taking place in Derceto Manor, where the 1992 original was set.

On March 22nd Dragon’s Dogma 2 drops, the feverishly anticipated sequel to Capcom’s criminally underrated open-world action RPG. This has the same kind of extremely vocal fanbase that Demon’s Souls did before FromSoft dropped Dark Souls and it blew up so big it inspired a whole genre. That’s not to say Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the second coming of Dark Souls, but it’ll probably click with Elden Ring fans dying for a big sprawling western fantasy action RPG with crunchy boss fights.

Meanwhile, if you’re ready to commit seppuku because Sony and Sucker Punch have been Shinobi silent regarding another Ghost of Tsushima, Rise of the Ronin might hold you over – and it’ll likely click with antsy Soulsborne fans too. The PS5-exclusive open-world action RPG comes courtesy of Team Ninja, the studio behind last year’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, the Nioh games and of course, Ninja Gaiden.

Still on March 22nd, and considerably less punishing than those last two games, there’s Princess Peach Showtime. Mario’s Mushroom Matriarch takes the spotlight in a long-overdue solo adventure of her own. This isn’t a role-playing game in the conventional sense but the whole thing is framed as a stage production, and Peach dons different costumes to play various roles, each with their own abilities. The stages and setpieces will be just that, in a literal theatrical sense. It’ll be nice to see Peach flexing her dramatic range, so here’s hoping it’s a crowd-pleaser. I probably don’t need to tell you that’s exclusively on Switch.

Anyway, if you’re looking for an ass kicking, mark your calendar for August 20th because that’s when the long awaited Black Myth Wukong will finally make its journey westward. Developed by Chinese studio Game Science, this Soulslike pulls from the classic folktale, Journey to the West, which was the original inspiration for Dragon Ball, and was loosely adapted into a video game back in 2010 in Ninja Theory’s Enslaved: Odyssey To The West. Our preview from last year says it’s definitely got some soulsborne DNA, but plays in a way that’s all its own. That’s on new-gen and PC.

Meanwhile, a few weeks and about 38,000 years later, there’s Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, which drops September 9th. Gears of War’s muscle-bound dudes in power armor with chainsaw guns copied Warhammer 40K’s homework just a bit, so it was only fair Warhammer did the same. Back in 2011, the original Space Marine was widely praised as a totally solid Gears-like set against the utterly bonkers backdrop of Games Workshop’s tabletop game. Now, a whole middle schooler’s lifetime later, it’s getting a sequel, which looks to take full advantage of new-gen hardware to render massive swarms of tyranids for you to brutally eviscerate in the name of the Emperor.

Continuing the Warhammer 40K naming convention of Aggressive Word plus Type of Melee Weapon followed by a number, there’s also Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. The follow up to Ninja Theory’s 2017 sleeper hit, Senua’s Sacrifice, Senua’s Saga looks to be raising the bar in every possible way while maintaining its blend of dark fantasy and psychological horror, with a heavy emphasis on the psychology. That’s on Xbox Series and PC but we do not have a release date quite yet.

Also on Xbox Series and PC with no hard release date is STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl, though that does currently have a release window of sometime in the first quarter of 2024. Considering this game’s development was put on hold so members of the Ukrainian team could step away from their desks to defend their country from invading Russian forces, I don’t think anyone will fault the studio for the long wait, or get mad if the release gets delayed further. It looks like a massively ambitious game and the original is a modern classic, though maybe not exactly modern anymore. In the time since the last STALKER game was released, the actual Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a tourist destination.

From this point onward, the rest of the games listed don’t have release dates or release windows at all – it’s the wild west! Speaking of which, one of these games is Star Wars Outlaws, and it’s wild it took this long to get a game that can be described as “GTA but with speeder bikes and blasters and Jabba the Hutt.” From the looks of things, that’s what Outlaws is shaping up to be – though, to be precise, it’s a Ubisoft game so a more apt comparison might be Watch Dogs with Womp Rats. I’m definitely not complaining at the prospect of an open-world Star Wars game that focuses on the scum and villainy of that galaxy far, far away. I will, however, complain if Bossk and Dengar and Zuckuss don’t show up. Boba Fett’s fine.

Supergiant Games has been chugging along for over a decade regularly putting out colorful, deceptively complex games that have consistently pleased critics and fans alike, and Hades was met with such a unanimously positive reception you can’t blame them for making Hades 2.

For any Persona fans rolling their eyes at all the casual newcomers flocking to Persona 3 Reload, I have just the thing, which you probably already know about: Metaphor: ReFantazio, a brand new RPG in a new universe from a ton of people behind the Shin Megami Tensei / Persona series,

If you want a JRPG that doesn’t go quite as hard in the paint or the fonts in the graphic design department, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remakes the beloved Gamecube game for Switch, which should be a nice follow-up to the Super Mario RPG remake we got in 2023.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 is yet another long awaited sequel that became even more long-awaited after the decision was made to go back to square one in the hands of a new developer, but the good news is that new developer is The Chinese Room, the studio behind the Amnesia games and Dear Esther.

If the words “Seiken Densetsu” means anything to you, you’re probably well aware of Visions of Mana, but if you’re not it’s the first mainline entry in Square Enix’s beloved ‘Mana’ action-RPG series that got its start as a final fantasy spinoff on the original Game Boy.

There’s no shortage of big, fat fantasy RPGs being cooked up by the various Xbox Game Studios, and Avowed looks like a nice amuse-bouche for anybody licking their chops for Fable or Skyrim 2: Dragon Born Again AKA The Elder Scrolls 6.

This list isn’t alphabetical but Zenless Zone Zero has too many Zs in the title to not put it last. It’s the next free-to-play action RPG from the Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail team, and this one has a super stylish quasi-futuristic urban setting, and is coming to mobile and PC, and probably console at a later date.

Speaking of which, Genshin is expected to hit Switch at some point – and there’s the very good possibility that Nintendo will drop a new console entirely, whether that’s a Super Switch, a Switch-U or something else entirely, which of course will have its share of new games at launch and thereafter.

There’s a ton of stuff we haven’t covered: Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is likely to be a substantial expansion to an already massive game, there are rumblings about the next Doom game, possibly a prequel, and then other long-awaited sequels like Metroid Prime 4 and Dragon Age: The Dread Wolf Rises, to name a few.

Let us know in the comments if we’ve missed a game you’re looking forward to in 2024.

As a massive fan of twice-annual charity speedrunning event Games Done Quick (GDQ), I’ve seen some pretty wild speedruns over the years. I’ve seen people beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Punch-Out!, and Super Mario Bros. 64 while blindfolded. I’ve witnessed Nier: Automata played one-handed. I’ve watched someone go absolutely ham on what looked like a cross between DDR and a washing machine. But this year’s show has a speedrun planned like none I’ve ever seen before.

This year, at Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), a dog is going to speedrun a game.

Until this announcement, I had never even heard of a dog being able to play a video game, let alone speedrun it. But this year, a Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter is going to beat Gyromite in front of a massive live audience, and we’re all going to lose our minds over it.

Admittedly, the very talented and adorable Peanut Butter (or PB, for short) did not sign up for AGDQ or learn to play Gyromite on his own. He’s still a dog! PB is aided by his doting owner JSR (who goes by JSR_ with the underscore when he speedruns). An electrician by trade, JSR has been streaming on Twitch on his own for seven and a half years, which eventually led him to speedrunning. He runs a number of games, most of them on the older side, and currently holds records in games like Tomb Raider, Link: The Faces of Evil, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, and The Legend of Zelda in the two players, one controller category, among many others. He’s even made an effort to speedrun a game from every single episode of Angry Video Game Nerd. And he’s had five runs at GDQs in the past, with a sixth planned for this year’s AGDQ of Castlevania 3. But not before he makes sure PB has his own chance to shine.

Speaking to JSR earlier this year, he tells me PB was a pandemic pup who he bonded with after being furloughed in April of 2020, which left him desperately wanting a “buddy” to keep him company. He spent some months on a waiting list, patiently reading up on the literature around how to train Shiba Inus, before his turn for a pup came around:

“Initially I wanted to get a girl, and the breeder calls me up in October, and I go down to the house and they have three dogs available, two girls and a boy,” JSR says. “And the two girls were real scared. They were real shy. One of them peed all over me when she got in the little playpen they set up. And I was just thinking, ‘That’s just how Shibas are.’ And then they bring [PB] into the playpen and he’s just the most social, full-of-life dog. He just immediately jumps on me, starts giving me kisses, we start playing tug of war. I knew it right then. I was like, ‘This is the one. I want him. I love him.’”

JSR almost immediately settled on the name Peanut Butter as a tribute to his own love of speedrunning. “Whenever we do the best we’ve ever done, we call it a personal best, a PB,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Well, if I name him Peanut Butter, that means I can have the best PB every day.’ And that’s why his name is Peanut Butter.”

Cheesy Motivations

Immediately upon getting PB, JSR wanted to train him to be “good at everything.” And PB learned fast. He caught on to so many tricks and skills so quickly that JSR started looking for more interesting challenges.

One day, while training PB, JSR suddenly remembered Gyromite from an Angry Video Game Nerd stream. Gyromite is an NES game from the ‘80s that makes use of the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B., accessory. Players use R.O.B. to depress the A and B buttons, which in turn cause pillars to rise and fall and allow the character on screen to progress. At its core, Gyromite is just about pressing A and B at the right time and for long enough to move forward, but the R.O.B. accessory complicated it. But what if, instead of using R.O.B., someone used a D-O-G?

That’s exactly what JSR did.

“I first had to train him to press the buttons on command, and that was easy,” he says. “He’s smart. He picked that up quick. But dogs have the attention span of a three-year-old, so it took about a year of constant daily training, every single day, with me using his food as collateral. And now he’s pretty good. He can hold the button down for 20 or 30 seconds before he starts getting antsy.”

To help PB, JSR had to custom build a controller that a dog could actually use. With a friend’s help, JSR rigged an arcade fight stick to work with a PC GameCube adapter and an emulator playing Gyromite. He also constructed bigger, more dog-friendly buttons so PB could press them more accurately. The resulting controller has a large button each for A and B, plus a Start button. And then, because PB is “a dog and he’s unable to press easily two buttons down because he has no leverage, he’ll fall on his face,” there’s also a smaller button that depresses both A and B simultaneously.

“But to give it a little bit more appeal, because I didn’t want it to be too easy, I made it smaller, so he has to target a little bit,” JSR explains. “So that way people aren’t like, ‘Oh, he’s pressing the yellow button. He’s cheating.’ He only presses the yellow button when he has to.”

For PB to run Gyromite, JSR has to set up the emulator and put the controller in front of him. But after that, PB does every single input in the game himself…with a bit of food motivation.

“Every time he streams, I have to plan his meals, because I don’t want to overload him with snacks,” JSR says. “He gets fed twice a day, so I’ll usually sneak a little bit back his meal so that it’s when it’s playtime. I’ll start with just kibble, and then probably about 10, 15 minutes in, he starts losing interest. That’s usually when I’ll bust out the training snacks. They’re just little cheap small dog tidbits that are like meat slurry. They get his attention for a second or two and then he knows what’s coming…the cheese is usually what we end up going to. String cheese, Velveeta. He loves both. He’s a sucker for string cheese.”

That’s how PB will run Gyromite at AGDQ, with his run currently planned for Tuesday, January 16th at 10:40am PT. But PB can’t attend the in-person event in Pittsburgh, PA – JSR says it’s too expensive to fly him out, as his dog ticket costs more than JSR’s human ticket would.

“But also, I haven’t figured out a way to train him where he’ll be in front of 1000 people,” he says. “At the event, when you’re in that room, it’s bright lights, loud. And he’s social. He’s a social doge. I know exactly what he would not do, and he would not press the button. He would be like, ‘I want pets and treats and toys and I’m going to run around and sniff everything.’ But he does great whenever he is focused and inspired and not super sleepy.”

Instead, JSR will help PB do his run on Tuesday, and then immediately get on a plane by himself to attend his own in-person Castlevania 3 run across the country on Thursday, January 18, at 9AM PT, while PB cheers him on from home.

PB’s run of Gyromite will also stand out in that he’s competing in a speedrunning category built just for him. When PB first started running Gyromite, JSR says, there was no official speedrunning category for the kind of Gyromite playthrough he was doing that didn’t involve R.O.B. But JSR submitted a video to speedrun.com anyway, just to see what would happen. The very next day, there was a new category listed with “dog assistance.” So PB is officially competing in Gyromite category “Game B – Dog Assistance – NES” at AGDQ. Currently, PB is the only runner in this category, and thus the world record holder with a time of 25:29 – which JSR hopes he’s able to beat at AGDQ.

“It’s more like human assistance,” JSR says. “I’m not pressing the buttons. If he says, ‘I’m not going to press the button,’ the run dies. And he’s done that a few times too.”

How to Speedrun, for Dogs

While Gyromite will be the stage upon which PB debuts at AGDQ, it’s not all the pup can play. JSR has been teaching him to play light gun game Wild Gunman, but PB’s pretty far from meeting speedrunning criteria on it due to the required reaction times. JSR’s also working on training PB to play games like Excitebike and Dr. Mario alongside him, in a sort of two players, one controller situation.

“The big restriction with him – don’t tell nobody, it’s a secret – but he’s not really watching the game,” JSR says. “He’s reacting to my commands. All of what he inputs has to be his reaction to my commands, plus my reaction. So games like Mario Bros. or other types of genres like that don’t really work, because then it’s a really complicated, convoluted arrangement for us to do the inputs. And usually by then we’ve already died. But…we’re looking for ideas, and so far we’re still kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, but there’s going to be some other games. This will not be the only time he makes his appearance. We definitely plan on him being a staple of GDQ going forward.”

At this point in the interview I turned to PB, and asked him if he had any tips for people who wanted to speedrun Gyromite. With JSR’s translation help, this is what PB said:

“Definitely make sure you’re paying attention to which button does which door. It’s really easy for a random sound or a smell, or maybe drooling about that cheese that JSR has in his hand. You don’t want to get distracted by the cheese, as easy as it is. Every good boy knows to make sure you hit the right color…You want to make sure you get plenty of nap time before game time, because it’s a well-known fact that dogs need their beauty sleep.”

As a speedrunner himself, JSR is deeply proud of what PB has accomplished, and throughout our conversation is mostly excited that the draw of a dog will hopefully bring in lots of donations for the Prevent Cancer Foundation during the charity marathon. Competitive as the speedrunning space can be, he says, GDQ isn’t really about competition. It’s about raising money and giving the speedrunning community an opportunity to showcase their craft in a way that’s fun and entertaining for a mass audience.

“It’s like a community effort, because speed-running isn’t about me versus you,” he says. “A lot of people think it is, maybe to some folks it is, but I don’t think that’s really what it is. I think it’s you versus yourself and overcoming your own roadblocks, your own mental blocks. Whether it’s just trying to get that PB or trying to teach a dog how to speedrun a game, it’s coming up with creative and innovative and new ways to go really fast in video games. I think that’s what it’s all about and that’s what GDQ has become. And I’m really just happy that I get to be a footnote in what might be the coolest thing at this AGDQ. I’m really excited.”

And as for the Coolest Thing at This AGDQ himself, PB? He gets cheese and attention, so he’s about as stoked as a dog can be.

“We’re partners, aren’t we? Are we partners?” JSR asks PB during our interview. He holds out his hand. PB regards him for a moment, then drops a paw in JSR’s open palm. “We’re partners,” JSR concludes.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

All slideshow images courtesy of JSR_