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Executor’s Remembrance quests in Elden Ring Nightreign shine a light on one of the game’s more mysterious characters. On top of providing you with great relics, these quests offer more context to Executor, the other Nightfarers, and Limveld as a whole. Completing the Executor Remembrance quest consists of gardening and self-reflection (only partly joking), but luckily, does not require beating the final Nightlord.

Here’s our in-progress Executor Remembrance quest walkthrough for *Elden Ring Nightreign,*explaining how to start Executor’s Remembrance quest and how to complete each task along the way.

How to start Executor’s Remembrance Quest

Executor’s Remembrance quest begins in his journal’s second chapter. Unlocking a chapter in a specific character’s journal requires you to play expeditions as that character until it unlocks.

In our experience, this chapter unlocks after completing two or three expeditions as Executor. No matter the outcome, the expedition will count as long as you don’t leave it before its conclusion. That includes solo or multiplayer runs. The chapter will unlock eventually.

When checking Executioner’s journal after an expedition, if you can access Chapter 2, you should see the “begin Remembrance” button that, upon selection, will lock you into the first Remembrance quest for Executioner. It’s important to remember that you can postpone and return to the Remembrance quest at any time without penalty. If you start a quest that requires an expedition objective, you have to complete that objective with that character.

If you team up with someone else who’s also working through a Remembrance quest, there’s a chance your objective won’t be the one that shows up on the map in your next expedition. It might be worth prioritizing a full party run or a solo run to ensure your objective is chosen.

Chapter 2: Pick flowers in Limveld

The Executor approaches a canvas in Executor Remembrance quest walkthrough in Elden Ring Nightreign.

Speak with the Guardian who’s looking at a painting nearby in the Journal room. After exhausting his dialogue, you’ll want to find Priestess (also known as Duchess) and exhaust her dialogue as well. If you are having any trouble finding them or any NPC you need to speak with, opening the Roundtable Hold map should reveal their locations, indicated by an exclamation point. Exhausting her dialogue will grant you the personal objective: Find flowers in Limveld.

In your next expedition, check your map for a red quest icon. It will point out where you can find the Blessed flowers you’re looking for. Upon arrival, you will find a glowing patch of flowers; however, before you can pick them, you must defeat the Stray Bloodhound Knight. This fight is manageable at low levels, but if your parries aren’t accurate, we recommend focusing on it at the start of the second day.

After defeating the boss, you can inspect the glowing flowers to obtain the Blessed Flowers. Once acquired, you must finish the run. If you play solo and think it’s okay to just quit out of the expedition, you will have to do the objective again. It doesn’t matter how the expedition ends; you must ensure that you complete it correctly.

Once you make it back to the Roundtable hold, talk to the Priestess again and exhaust her dialogue. Afterwards, you can find the Iron Menial, give him the blessed flowers, and then exhaust his dialogue. After talking with the Iron Menial, nearby is a canvas that you can interact with for a short cutscene before concluding the Remembrance quest.

Completing the Rememberance quest grants you Blessed Flowers as a relic that grants Executor a boost to dexterity as well as lifesteal when you unlock the use of the cursed sword while your Character skill is active.

We’re still working on the final chapters of Executor’s remembrance quest and will update this guide with the required steps and rewards soon.


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Square Enix announced that the beloved strategy game Final Fantasy Tactics is getting a lavish enhanced version called Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. Square Enix revealed a breathtaking teaser trailer at Sony’s State of Play showcase on Wednesday.

The game’s visuals offered a look into a polished and refined version of Ivalice, an updated look for our hero, Ramza Beoulve, and a glimpse at the game’s deep customization and strategic combat, revamped for a modern audience. Additionally, the game offers two different versions to fans: an enhanced version and a classic version of the game.

The enhanced edition adds fully voiced dialogue, an optimized UI, graphical refinements, and other quality-of-life features, while the classic version preserves the OG feel of the PlayStation title plus the translation incorporated into the PSP port, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is scheduled to launch in Sept. 30, 2025 for PlayStation 5, with pre-orders opening today.

The original Final Fantasy Tactics was released for PlayStation in Japan in 1997 and then in 1998 in North America. Serving as a spin-off of the main FF series, the game focused on strategy-based combat for its turn-based battles and was met with critical acclaim upon release.

This success eventually led to more games in the Tactics franchise, including 2003’s Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the Game Boy Advance*, 2007’s Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift* on the Nintendo DS*,* and an enhanced version of the original game for the PSP with Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. Various ports of Final Fantasy Tactics were released years after, including a port to iOS and Android in 2013, Mobage in 2014, and then the Nintendo Wii U virtual console in 2016.

While Tactics is commemorated for many reasons, one of the franchise’s most defining features included the robust job system, which saw players customizing their characters with different classes and unique abilities, injecting a new concept into the FF mythos.

Fans have been begging Square Enix to revisit the Tactics franchise for years but to no avail. But the wait and longing are finally over; Final Fantasy Tactics has officially returned.


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Nintendo Switch 2 will launch with 256 GB of internal storage — eight times the storage size of the original Switch. But some portion of that advertised 256 GB of storage is gobbled up by the Switch 2’s system software, meaning users won’t have access to the entire amount. That’s typical of virtually any device; the software required to run applications like the interface, GameChat, and Nintendo eShop needs storage too!

According to Nintendo’s published tech specs for Switch 2, an unidentified portion of the 256 GB of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is reserved for use by the system. After getting our hands on a launch-day version of Switch 2, and installing the console’s day-one system update, we now have a better idea just how much is available to users.

After installing the system update and transferring Switch data to Switch 2, the available storage displayed approximately 228 GB to 230 GB of available storage, not counting any of the games, save data, or album images and videos that were transferred over.

That said, after redownloading my entire Switch library to Switch 2, I still have 160 GB remaining — plenty of space for actual native Switch 2 games. Plus, Switch 2 storage can be expanded with microSD Express cards, so if 256 GB seems meager to you, available storage can quickly be doubled for less than the cost of a physical copy of Mario Kart World.


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The main character of Silent Hill f crouches on the ground

Silent Hill f will launch on Sept. 25, Konami revealed during Wednesday’s PlayStation State of Play. It’ll be the first new mainline Silent Hill game in over a decade and the first game since last year’s Silent Hill 2 Remake.

It follows a student in Japan — a first for the series typically set in rural America — as the town she lives in is overrun with horrifying enemies only a Silent Hill game could produce. A fog descends, causing the town’s citizens to disappear.

The student comes across what seem to be her fellow students, now turned into terrifying creatures, as she fights her way out of a school with a pipe as her weapon. She also wields a spear when approaching a shrine and the ominous figure before it, whose face is the stuff of nightmares.

Silent Hill f was originally announced in 2022 and is being developed by the Taiwan-based studio Neobards Entertainment with additional support from Japanese developers. It’ll will release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.


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Summer Game Fest is back in 2025, in which host Geoff Keighley presents several hours of video game announcements, trailers, and world premieres. As always, expect updates on games that have been previously announced, alongside some likely reveals of new games. Also, Hideo Kojima.

Here’s everything we know about the biggest gaming news event of the summer, including where to watch Summer Game Fest 2025, what time the show starts, and what to expect from the stream.

Summer Game Fest start times in your time zone

As announced on the Summer Game Fest website, the show will begin on Friday, June 6, at 5 p.m. ET. Depending on where you live, here’s when to be ready:

2 p.m. PDT for the West Coast of North America5 p.m. EDT for the East Coast of North America10 p.m. BST for the U.K.11 p.m. CEST for west mainland Europe6 a.m. JST in Japan (June 7)

Where to watch Summer Game Fest 2025

You can watch the Summer Game Festlivestream via The Game Awards’ YouTube channel or Twitch channel, or via the YouTube embed at the top of this post. A countdown timer will likely start shortly before the show. No worries if you miss it though; you can always watch the archived stream after the event, or catch up with all of the biggest announcements on Polygon after the show.

What to expect from Summer Game Fest 2025

The Summer Game Fest 2025 livestream lasts approximately two hours and is expected to feature a run of trailers, game updates, and, most likely, some surprise announcements. Geoff Keighley will open the show and, between the slew of announcements, interview some of the developers.

As confirmed by Summer Game Fest, Hideo Kojima is one of the developers who will make an appearance, probably to talk about the upcoming Death Stranding 2.

Don't miss it when Hideo Kojima takes the stage live at #SummerGameFest next Friday, June 6.Watch the global livestream at https://t.co/gO9QVWF4nN at 2p PT / 5p ET / 9p GMT / 6a JST. pic.twitter.com/bbjuQypOmq

— Summer Game Fest (@summergamefest) May 27, 2025

Death Stranding 2 is one of the games featured in “Geoff’s hype trailer, a two-minute trailer for the trailers of Summer Game Fest. It’s shown alongside games like Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, Dune: Awakening, and Mafia: The Old Country. There are no guarantees, of course, but these games will make some sort of apperance during the show.

As some of the featured games have already been released, including South of Midnight and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, you may expect some DLC announcements as well. The studio behind FPS game Atomic Heart has already confirmed their Summer Game Fest presence on X, which places them in the “will probably reveal post-release content” category.

It's official!We’re part of #SummerGameFest 2025 – airing live on June 6, 2 PM (PT).📺 Tune in and watch it unfold.@summergamefest @geoffkeighley #AtomicHeart pic.twitter.com/qFxO69sgEf

— Mundfish #AtomicHeart (@mundfish) June 2, 2025

The Summer Game Fest showcase is immediately followed by the Day of the Devs, which highlights some of the wildest and most promising indie games en route. Later in the weekend, Microsoft will host its annual Xbox Games Showcase, which is followed by a dedicated direct about The Outer Worlds 2.

Take a look at the full Summer Game Fest and not-E3 2025 schedule to ensure you don’t miss anything.


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The Revenant stands in a room and thinks about the Revenant remembrance quest walkthrough in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Revenant’s Remembrance quest in Elden Ring Nightreign might not be as involved as the some of the other quests (like, says, the Duchess‘), but it gives the Revenant some of her best relics. There’s also a fair bit of character lore about how the Revenant came to be a sentient doll with a trio of ghosts for family. You’ll have to challenge and defeat a couple of Nightreign‘s main bosses to progress, though.

Our in-progress Elden Ring Nightreign guide gives you a Revenant Remembrance quest walkthrough, including how to start Revenant’s quest and the best way to deal with Night’s Corrosion.

How to Start Revenant’s Remembrance in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Revenant pointing at the Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign

The first step here is is having Revenant as a playable character. Our guide on how to unlock the Revenant explains the process in detail, but the short version is purchasing the Besmirched Frame and defeating the Revenant and her summons in combat.

Once you win the fight, you’ll return to Roundtable Hold and can play as the Revenant from then on. Her first Remembrance quest begins in Chapter 1, so it’s available immediately — no additional Nightlord victories required.

Chapter 1: Retrieve a Weapon Wielded by Forces of Night

The Revenant challenging Gladius in Elden Ring Nightreign

Speak with the Duchess after you begin the Remembrance, and exhaust her dialogue options. Chat with the Guardian after that, and hear his request. He asks you to bring him a weapon of the night so he can better understand how to defend against your common foe. Here’s where things may get a little confusing.

If you check the journal after hearing the Guardian’s request, the objective tells you to defeat either Tricephalos or the Darkdrift Night in Limveld. However, several players have reported that they get nothing from defeating the Darkdrift Knight. The quest may be bugged in some way, but since you’re guaranteed to complete it by defeating Tricephalos, just set the big red dog as your target Nightlord for the next expedition. Don’t forget to actually play as the Revenant as well, or it won’t count.

The Revenant acquiring a Blade of Night Fragment in Elden Ring Nightreign

Defeating Tricepalos earns you the Blade of Night Fragment key item. Give it to the Guardian once you return to Rountable Hold, and complete the Remembrance. You get the Small Makeup Brush as a reward, a blue relic that gives the Revenant a power boost when her summoned spirits are on the field and increases Rune acquisition for the entire team.

Chapter 5: Night’s Corrosion

The Revenant approaching the Recluse in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Revenant’s next chapters unlock after you complete Chapter 1, so you can read those and begin Chapter 5’s Remembrance quest immediately. Speak to the Duchess again once the quest starts, and then find the Recluse on the map’s western edge near some trees. She directs you to sit and reflect on the darkness within.

Doing so transports you to a gloomy corridor with a painting at the end, which leads to another gloomy corridor, but with a large library at the end of that one. Enter the library to trigger a cluster of night-infused Putrid Corpse enemies — the ones that scream and explode when they approach you.

The Revenant facing a room of exploding Night’s Corrosion zombies in Elden Ring Nightreign

You’re automatically level five with three Flask of Crimson Tear charges for this battle, but if you keep summoning the Revenant’s spirits and stay on the move, you should be able to get through the encounter without taking much damage or even having to fight the creatures. If you’re struggling, purchase the Revenant-specific Drizzly Scene relic from the Small Jar Bazaar and equip it. It adds a ghostflame explosion effect to the Revenant’s ultimate art, and it’s powerful enough to take out any nearby Putrid Corpses in the process.

Examine the Revenant doll once the fight ends, and return to Rountable Hold. Speak with the Recluse to finish the quest. This time, you get Revenant’s Chalice, a new reliquary that has a blue slot, a green slot, and a free slot.

We’re still working on Revenant’s Chapter 7 quest and will update with more information soon.

For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, and how to get all of Nightreign’s skins for each character.


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The Raider thinks about the Raider Remembrance quest walkthrough in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Raider’s Remembrance quests in Elden Ring Nightreign take on a different form compared to the Recluse‘s and Duchess‘. True to his nature, the Raider’s memories are all about big, arena-style fights against intimidating opponents. There’s a bit less lore in this set of quests, but you get some excellent relics for the Raider.

This in-progress Elden Ring Nightreign guide includes a Raider Remembrance quest walkthrough, including how to start the chain, what to expect from each arena opponent, and how to unlock more of the Raider’s chapters.

How to start Raider’s Remembrance quest in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Raider holding onto a spectral hawk’s feet in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Raider’s first chapter unlocks automatically after you begin the game, but his first quest is gated behind defeating Tricephalos, the three-headed dog and Nightreign‘s first main boss. Once you do that, you’ll get to play as the Duchess and unlock the Raider’s second journal chapter.

Raider Chapter 2: Onestrike Gladiator

The Raider examining a large stone monument in Elden Ring Nightreign

Speak to the Iron Menial next to the large tombstone in Roundtable Hold’s cemetery, and then touch the stone as directed. It transports you to a gladiator-style arena, where you’ll face a named opponent in one-on-one combat, the Onestrike Gladiator.

Despite his size and status as a named enemy, the Onestrike Gladiator struggles to maintain his poise after Raider attacks. Light and heavy attacks will interrupt the Gladiator’s own moves, and you can knock him back by using the Raider’s character skill. Don’t hesitate to use that when the Gladiator gets close. Activating the skill reduces incoming damage until the Raider finishes attacking.

The Raider facing down the Onestrike Gladiator in Elden Ring Nightreign

Nightreign transports you back to Roundtable Hold after you defeat Onestrike Gladiator. Speak to the Menial again, touch the stone as directed, and finish the quest. No more battles just yet.

The Raider’s second quest unlocks in Chapter 4, but that won’t appear until you collect more memory fragments. Nightreign is reticent about handing those out freely. You may get some the next time you complete an expedition, or you might have to challenge and defeat one or more of Nightreign‘s main bosses before it sees fit to give you more fragments.

We’re still trying to convince Nightreign to hand over memory fragments, but we’ll update with the Raider’s next two chapters soon.

For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, and how to get all of Nightreign’s skins for each character.


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Ironeye’s Remembrance quests in Elden Ring Nightreign give you more understanding about this deadly assassin, including where they come before having been summoned to the Roundtable. The series of missions you’re sent to complete this remembrance involve not only facing special enemies but also defeating Nightreign’s final boss.

Completing Ironeye’s remembrance quest is an arduous (and lengthy) project. In our in-progress Elden Ring Nightreign guide, see the Ironeye Remembrance quest walkthrough, covering how to start the chain of quests, where to find the targets, and the rewards you gain from it along the way.

How to start Ironeye’s Remembrance in Elden Ring Nightreign

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing Ironeye facing the Roundtable.

If you want to dive deeper into the past and lore behind Ironeye, then you want to unlock their Remembrance quest. Ironeye’s first Remembrance mission appears in Chapter 4 in Ironeye’s section in the Journal.

While the game doesn’t explain how to unlock new entries in the Journal, in our experience, it took a few expeditions playing Ironeye for Chapter 4 to become available. You don’t have to necessarily kill the Nightlord of an expedition for the mission to unlock. It will be considered “completed” even if the whole group dies on the first day.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the chapter 4 in Ironeye’s Journal.

To start the initial mission, you must first interact with the Journal and, in Chapter 4, select “begin Remembrance” under the entry text. You will be transported to the Realm of Remembrance, another dimension from where you must queue for expeditions. A short description of the mission is shown on the right side of the “Expeditions menu” explaining what you must do.

All of Ironeye’s Remembrance quests are completed within expeditions. Even so, queueing while in the Realm of Remembrance does not ensure your objective will appear on the map if other players in your group are also pursuing their Remembrances.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the Expeditions menu where you see a list of bosses and the description of Ironeye’s first Remembrance mission.

You need to be playing Ironeye to complete their Remembrance quest, but you can leave the Realm of Remembrance at any time by interacting with the Journal again and choosing to “postpone Remembrance.” When you’re ready to jump into the hunt again, return to the Journal to restart the mission from where you stopped.

Chapter 4: Defeat the other Ironeye

A montage using two Elden Ring Nightreign screenshots showing the location where the Priestess is when you start Ironeye’s Remembrance quest.

Once you startstarted Ironeye’s Remembrance in Chapter 4 and appear in the Realm of Remembrance, you need to go talk to the Priestess. She’s on the west side of the Roundtable Hold, in a segment of the area under Small Jaz Bazaar’s room. There is a yellow icon indicating their location on the map. The best route to get there is by jumping the balcony south of the Roundtable and turning right into one of the openings.

You need to talk to her about the Fellowship and the Traitor before the option “accept task” appears, which asks you to another world’s version of your character. After exhausting the dialogue, go to the Roundtable and queue for any expedition.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the Priestess and Ironeye talking to her.

For us, the objective — indicated by a red icon with a flag on it — was consistently located on the northwest side of the map in all the expeditions we ran while trying to complete this mission. Since it is close to the border of the map, it is one of the first places affected by the initial rain. As a result, you should try to go there on the start of the first or second day.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the location on the map where Ironeye’s first Remembrance objective is located during an expedition.

The target, Night Huntsman, is located under a large bridge. You’ll know you’re in the right location because the trees and other parts of the scenario emit a light purple glow. Be sure to clear the area from other enemies before starting the fight. When you’re ready, pass over the barricades and the Night Huntsman will appear.

You want to have leveled up a bit before facing this enemy since the Night Huntsman is basically a minor boss. Weaker than the regular field boss you find in Elden Ring Nightreign, but strong enough to kill you pretty fast. But if all goes well and the rest of the group follows you, there’s nothing to worry about.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the Night Huntsman boss, the enemy you need to defeat to complete Ironeye’s Remembrance quest.

When you defeat the Night Huntsman, you gain the Traitor’s Letter. Finish the expedition by defeating the Nightlord (or die trying), then go back to the Priestess.

Completing this first mission gives you Ironeye’s Chalice (which allows you to equip a Burning Scene and a Tranquil Scene relics with a third free slot) and the Cracked Sealing Wax relic (which extends the duration of a weak point inflicted by Ironeye and gives runes when you land critical hits).

Chapter 6: Finding an Edge of Order

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the chapter 6 in Ironeye’s Jounal.

Ironeye’s second Remembrance mission becomes available when you kill two bosses after having finished Chapter 4’s quest. To progress in the chain of quests and face the second challenge, go to Chapter 6 in the Journal.

In the first part of the mission, you need to talk to the Priestess. Visit the same place where you initiated the first quest and, instead of the cloaked woman, you will find a note on the ground telling you to go downward into the crypt.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing the Ironeye character reading a note left by the Priestess saying “The one you await has arrived. Do not delay, come to the crypt below”.

Inside, you find the Priestess and the Traitor. A little interaction takes place in the morbidly white room and the next quest’s next stage is revealed. You need to obtain an Edge of Order, which, according to the Priestess, can be found with Night Centaurs. The only centaur in the game is Fulghor, the final boss in the Darkdrift Knight.

An Elden Ring Nightreign screenshot showing Ironeye beside the Priestess and the Traitor inside a white crypt.

Fulghor is a brutal boss and fighting them requires a lot of attention and practice. (A little bit of luck might come in handy too.) You need to complete the Darkdrift Knight expedition and defeat Fulghor to obtain the Edge of Order.

We are still working on the remaining steps of the quest and will update this in-progress guide to show all the remaining steps to complete Ironeye’s Remembrance quests in Elden Ring Nightreign.

For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, how to unlock the Duchess and Revenant, and the best early Duchess build.


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The Duchess stands below some light in the Duchess

The Duchess‘ Remembrance quest in Elden Ring Nightreign is where you’ll find some essential lore about what’s going on in Roundtable Hold and who some of the Nightfarers are. It’s one of Nightreign‘s longest and most involved quest chains, and completing it requires you to defeat at least half of all the main bosses. However, if you want more of Nightreign‘s story and some excellent relics for the Duchess, it’s worth the time.

Our in-progress Elden Ring Nightreign guide gives you a Duchess Remembrance quest walkthrough with everything from how to start the Duchess’ Remembrance and where to find the Wylder to the best strategy for defeating the Revenant when she challenges you to a duel.

How to start Duchess’ Remembrance in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Duchess standing in front of the Raider in Elden Ring Nightreign’s Roundtable Hold

The first part of unlocking the Duchess’ Remembrance is, of course, being able to play as the Duchess. Our guide for how to unlock the Duchess gets into it in more detail, but the gist of it is that you need to make a bit of progress against the Nightlords and obtain a key item.

The first two chapters of the Duchess’ journal are available automatically once she becomes playable, but the first Remembrance quest only unlocks after you obtain memory fragments.

Duchess Remembrance Chapter 3: Armament Maintenance Materials

A map image showing where to find armament materials in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Raider wants a word, so chat with him to learn about his concerns regarding the Wylder’s health. Speak with the Wylder, then talk to the Raider again. He wants you to gather some armament maintenance materials to keep everyone’s equipment in proper fighting shape.

Start an expedition while you’re reliving the Duchess’ memory. The specific boss choice doesn’t matter, and the objective remains active whether the map is undergoing a Shifting Earth change or not. The objective location also seems to be in the same place regardless, unlike with the Recluse’s Remembrance. Ideally, you want to tackle this challenge at the start of day one or day two, in case the circle ends up closing it off.

Head to the objective marker in the map’s southwestern corner once you’re at least level three or four, as you’ll be fighting three Guardians of thew Dew enemies. These club-wielding foes have slow attacks, but they also spread poison dust in the area. You have time to rush in and attack before poison builds up, so don’t worry too much about avoiding it.

The Duchess battling three Guardians of the Dew in Elden Ring Nightreign

The challenge goes more smoothly if you’re in a party of three, but if you’re playing solo, make sure to play defensively.

Pick one of the three targets, get a full dagger chain attack in (if you can safely do it), then retreat and wait for an opening to do it again. The Duchess’ unique Burning Scene relic that you can purchase from the Small Jar Bazaar is a useful one to equip if you have it, as it activates her skill’s damage reprise whenever you complete a full dagger chain.

Collect the Golden Dew after you defeat the guardians, and complete the expedition. Speak to the Wylder once you’re back in Roundtable Hold to receive Faded Iron Coins, and then chat with the Raider, Revenant, and Iron Menial in that order to finish the quest.

The Golden Dew key item becomes an equippable topaz relic for the Duchess, one that improves the Duchess’ skill power and boosts power for any attacks with added affinity. That applies to weapons with elemental affinities such as fire or poison, but also to the Duchess’ magic dagger when you activate its skill.

Duchess Remembrance Chapter 5: Find the Wylder

The Duchess following a trail of flour-y footprints in Elden Ring Nightreign

Chapter 5 unlocks after you defeat any Nightlord or complete several expeditions. Nightreign counts any Nightlord defeats that you pulled off, even if they happen before you complete Chapter 3.

The quest starts in the Hold’s waiting room again, but there’s no one around this time and only a set of footprints for company. Your objective is to find the Wylder, the only Nightfarer who isn’t showing up on the map. You can follow the footprints to the dining room and examine a table to get another clue or just head to the location immediately.

The Duchess standing near the Wylder after finding him during a quest in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Wylder is resting against a wall near where the Executor paints, and he’s got a plate of food nearby. Eat his lunch, then speak to the Wylder, and tell the Iron Menial about your new discovery to end this quest. Chapter 5’s reward is the Duchess’ Chalice, a new reliquary with a blue slot, a yellow slot, and a free slot.

Duchess Remembrance Chapter 6: Weathervane’s Words and the Revenant

The Duchess standing near the Raider in Roundtable Hold’s dining room in Elden Ring Nightreign

Chapter 6 should be available immediately after you complete the Chapter 5 quest, and this one has two parts. Speak with the Raider in the Hold’s dining room again to learn about his apprentice, a young lad named Weathervane, and to express the Duchess’ doubts about what to do next. These conversations unlock a new objective for your next expedition, which you can knock out now or after dealing with the Revenant.

The objective is to find Weathervane’s message in Limveld, and the location is, in our experience, always on a cliff in the map’s northeastern segment. You’ll have to defeat three Fallen Mercenaries, large, agile enemies with greatswords. It’s a steeper challenge compared to the Guardians of the Dew fight, as the Fallen Mercenaries can stagger or knock you back with a single attack.

A map image showing where to find Weathervane’s Words in Elden Ring Nightreign

If you’re playing alone, make this a night two objective. That’ll give you enough time to reach level five or higher and have a better chance of surviving the battle. Collect Weathervane’s message after you defeat the Fallen Mercenaries, and complete the expedition.

How to beat the Duchess vs Revenant boss fight

The Duchess attacking Sebastian the skeleton in Elden Ring Nightreign

The quest’s second part involves speaking to the Revenant. She challenges you to a duel, and like with the battle that unlocks the Revenant, she brings her friends along. You can just ignore Helen, Frederick, and Sebastian in favor of attacking the Revenant immediately, but the battle is much more difficult that way. It takes place in a small, enclosed area, which makes dodging attacks from four characters almost impossible, and if Sebastian the skeleton uses his ghostflame beam, you’re finished.

The easier option is to take out Revenant’s summons first. Start with Helen the swordswoman, since she’s faster, and then defeat Frederick the Pumpkin Head before moving on to Sebastian. The skeleton can’t turn around quickly, so if you attack from behind, you should be able to defeat him before he can do anything about it. Make sure to activate the Duchess’ magic dagger skill for extra damage, too.

In the best-case scenario, Revenant will stay far enough away from you that she won’t cast Triple Rings of Light, which gives you freedom to defeat her summons without interference. If you attack her at any point or get too close to her, though, she’ll start casting Incantations. Her Triple Rings of Light spell is tricky to dodge in close quarters and deals heavy damage, so this isn’t a situation you want to deal with.

The Duchess attacking Helen in Elden Ring Nightreign

Once her summons are gone, re-activate magic dagger if necessary, and start attacking the Revenant. She’ll use Triple Discs of Light, Death Lightning, and her standard claw attack. The best moment to launch an attack of your own is when revenant begins to cast a spell, as she’s vulnerable and won’t dodge away. If you defeated her summons first, Duchess’ ultimat art should be charged and ready for use. Cast it, get behind Revenant, and start attacking. There’s a high chance Duchess will land critical hits with each blow, but even if not, you’ll manage to take a chunk out of Revenant’s health bar anyway.

Once the battle ends, you get the Crown Medal relic. This one activates Duchess’ skill for free when she lands a dagger chain attack and increases all dagger power. The skill activation perk won’t stack with the Burning Scene relic, but having extra dagger power is always a good thing for the Duchess. Replace Burning Scene with this.

The Crown Medal relic in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Duchess’ final Remembrance quest unlocks after you defeat four Nightlords following the completion of Chapter 6. These all have to be different Nightlords as well, so you can’t just bully Tricephalos four times.

We’re still working on this portion of her Remembrance quest and will update soon with more information.

For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, how to unlock the Duchess and Revenant, and the best early Duchess build.


From Polygon via this RSS feed

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The Nintendo Switch 2 has changed Mii character creation, Polygon can confirm after going hands-on with the console. When creating new Mii avatars, players won’t be able to choose between male or female options like the Switch, but rather between two “styles.”

The new system offers players a generic avatars, with the option to customize the Mii. And if you’re wondering whether or not the Mii characters were redesigned, no, they weren’t. Instead, Mii look unchanged, carrying over the debut design from the Nintendo Wii.

While the genderless direction serves as a change for the Mii characters, Nintendo isn’t new to adopting this “select a style” language for gender preference.

In 2022, Splatoon 3 introduced the concept to the franchise, allowing players the freedom to style the Inklings with whatever clothes and hair excited them. Certain hairstyles were no longer locked to females and males, thus giving players more control over how they expressed themselves in Inkling customization and creation.

Two years before Splatoon 3, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released with similar options, opting to refer to gender as “styles.” Even before this, 2012’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf gave players the choice to dress gender neutral — the recent Mii change appears to be just an extension of that.

Nintendo Switch 2 launches on June 5, 2025.


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After Australian actor Sophie Wilde starred as Mia, the (literally) haunted protagonist of Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut horror movie Talk to Me, the writer-directors promised her they’d work with her again — even though she wasn’t going to lead their follow-up, Bring Her Back.

“We made a deal that she would appear in every single one of our films, in one way or another, as a cameo,” Danny Philippou told Polygon ahead of the movie’s release.

They were true to their word with Bring Her Back, but even the most eagle-eyed Easter egg spotters aren’t going to notice her appearance. In the film, bereaved mother Laura (The Shape of Water’s Sally Hawkins) repeatedly sits with her adopted son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) and watches videotapes showing a demonic ritual that plays heavily into the movie’s story. The footage is in grainy black and white, and the camera moves in an erratic handheld way — it’s a lot like watching an early found-footage horror movie.

“There is a flash of Sophie Wilde in one of the home videos that Laura is watching,” Danny says, “but you only see her arm and her body. You don’t see her face, unfortunately. But she was there! She’s in the credits as ‘Middle-aged Mum 4.’”

That glancing appearance wasn’t always the plan, though. “The plan was to see her face!” Michael says. “But ultimately, it had to come down to what was right for the story. The shot just didn’t work. We sent it to Sophie. We’re like, ‘Hey, look! This is your cameo!’ And it’s her arm.”

“So it’s less coy, more like nonexistent,” laughs Danny.

That said, the directors do say that Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are set in the same universe, and they’d like to continue to use small Easter eggs (though maybe not quite this small) to establish connections between all their movies. “It feels like all of the films that we work on are probably going to exist in that sort of world, I would say,” Danny says. “It’s just fun to have your own universe.”

That could include literal flashbacks or glimpses into the backstories of their existing movies. “Imagine in the next movie, [the characters] are driving along, and in the background, Laura is kidnapping Oliver,” Michael says.

“I can see it happening in future films — that’s definitely something I’m open to,” Danny says. “It just has to feel natural. That’s something I do love, a good Easter egg. With Talk to Me, having all the actors hidden in the opening scene, dressed up as different characters — [I love] things like that that people can see it and find. It’s so much fun. I mean, Michael tried doing an Easter egg to force himself into this movie, but we cut it out.”

Bring Her Back is in theaters now.


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Setting up a new Switch 2 and transferring your games and save data over from an original Switch is a pretty painless process. As long as you have a Nintendo Account and a little bit of time — roughly 30 minutes — you should have your Switch 2 up and running in no time.

But there can be a few hitches along the way, so to get your Switch and Switch 2 ready for launch day, we have a few tips that can potentially save you some time and frustration.

How to prepare to set up a Switch 2

Before setting up a Switch 2 — whether or not you’re transferring data from an original Switch — you’ll want to prepare by ensuring the following:

Have your wireless internet connection info handy. Nintendo Switch 2 requires a day-one system update to play. Make sure you know your wireless router address and password so you can quickly download the system update.Have your Nintendo Account login information at the ready. To get signed in to your account and have access to your digital purchases and cloud saves, you’re gonna need your Nintendo Account. This is also a good time to set up two-factor authentication on your Nintendo Account if you haven’t done so already.Plug in your Switch 2 to an AC adapter. You should probably use the one included with the system, but like most devices, Nintendo wants to ensure your system has uninterrupted power while installing system software. If you need to clear some space on a power strip or surge protector so you can plug in the Switch 2 AC adapter, do so before you start setting up your new console.If you’re transferring data from an existing Switch to Switch 2, make sure your original Switch is up to date with the latest system updates installed. And if you have multiple user accounts set up on your original Switch, make sure they’ve all accepted the necessary terms and conditions. Otherwise, the process may be interrupted, and you’ll have to futz with your original Switch.

How to update Switch 2 system software day one

After turning on the Switch 2 for the first time, you’ll be prompted to perform a system update. In our experience, this process takes only a few minutes — but during a busy launch day or launch weekend, there’s a good chance it could take longer as Nintendo’s servers are slammed with millions of new Switch 2 owners.

Download the Switch 2 day-one system update. This may take a little time, but the good news is that Nintendo has programmed some content to keep you informed and entertained during the process. There are cool, lo-fi beats to install system updates to, and tutorials about how to detach the Switch 2 Joy-Con controllers and information about other accessories for the system.

How to transfer Switch 1 data to Switch 2

If you’re transferring game and save data from an original Switch to Switch 2, don’t stress: This process is pretty easy and mostly hands off. Here’s what to expect.

Sign into your Nintendo Account. Nintendo makes this easy by providing a QR code to scan that will quickly get you signed into your account and give you a confirmation code to get the sign-in process started. You can also manually sign into your Switch 2 using your email/username and password.

Make sure your Switch and Switch 2 are physically near each other. Nintendo’s on-screen prompts indicate that both systems should be right next to each other, but I transferred data with the two systems about six feet apart.

Start the data transfer. This will require having both your Switch and Switch 2 on, then going into the Switch’s settings, then system settings, and scrolling all the way down to System Transfer to Nintendo Switch 2. Depending on how much content you have stored on your original Switch, the transfer process should take about 10 minutes or less.

Acknowledge the warnings, which may sound a little scary. As you transfer data from Switch to Switch 2, you’ll be warned that save data for some games will be removed from the Switch so that it can be transferred to Switch 2. This includes save data for certain Pokémon games, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and demos.

Transfer screenshots and video captures. If you have data like screenshots stored on a microSD card in your Switch, you’ll be asked to manually eject the card, plug it into your Switch 2, and transfer the data to the new system. This is quick, and should only take a minute or two, depending on how much screen capturing you’ve done.

Restart the system. You’ve done a lot of system updates already, but there’s just one more. You should be good to go.


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If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This seems to have been Nintendo’s watchword for the Switch 2 — and not just in terms of the design of this iterative sequel to the Switch, a runaway success that’s likely to become Nintendo’s biggest seller ever.

When it comes to marketing and promotion, too, Nintendo seems determined to follow the Switch playbook to the letter, even to the extent that the packaging looks so similar it might confuse people. The company’s plan for unveiling, promoting, and launching the Switch 2 maps exactly onto the strategy it used for the Switch eight years earlier: a basic video reveal, followed three months later by an in-depth Direct, game announcements, and press previews, followed just two months later by the launch.

Even by Nintendo’s standards, this was a conservative campaign. But this caution hasn’t really paid off. Despite the Switch 2’s similarity to the Switch — or, perhaps, because of it — this has been a very different launch in a very different context, and the playbook hasn’t run nearly as smoothly. In the short weeks since its full reveal in April, the Switch 2 has faced controversy and negative headlines, and Nintendo has seemed unusually fumbling in some of its responses.

Some of these headwinds will have been foreseen by Nintendo. Surely no one in the Kyoto or Seattle offices was expecting a positive reception to the console’s $449.99 price — a $150 jump up from the Switch and a historical high for a Nintendo console, even adjusting for inflation. With that sticker price set, there wasn’t much for execs like Bill Trinen to do but explain the economic context, make the best case for the console they could, and take everyone’s anger and disappointment on the chin.

Much the same will have been true for the furor over the $79.99 price of Mario Kart World. In a sense, Nintendo drew the short straw here, publicly taking the fall for a price hike that many other publishers are expected to employ before the end of the year. But Nintendo made the issue more contentious than it needed to be through inconsistency and lack of transparency in its communication about pricing across the board.

Charging for the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour demo software; gating one of the console’s primary features (GameChat) behind a Nintendo Switch Online subscription; charging variable amounts for Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrades to Switch games; these are all individually defensible decisions, but Nintendo’s messaging about them was jumbled and incomplete. Taken together with the Mario Kart World price, these decisions created a sense that Nintendo was nickel-and-diming customers and (rather ineptly) trying to hide it.

Other things happened that were at least partly beyond Nintendo’s control, but that contributed to a sense of instability around the launch. The Trump administration’s chaotic tariffs policy caused a delay to pre-orders and some pricing changes; when pre-orders eventually did go live in the U.S., many retailers’ systems couldn’t cope with the demand (the midnight timing set by Nintendo didn’t help.) Nintendo’s own invitation-only pre-order system was more orderly, but still overwhelmed. Although Nintendo had reportedly delayed the launch of the Switch 2 to provide adequate stock, it still seemed unprepared for the scale of demand.

Nintendo made some rare unforced errors, too. It didn’t get out in front of the controversial game-key cards — physical editions of games that don’t actually contain the game data — instead allowing news of them to trickle out via a support page. This was one of several technical details about the new system that Nintendo flubbed. In one small but inexplicable error, Nintendo originally promised support for variable refresh rate displays in docked mode, and then quietly removed mention of this feature from its websites, before eventually being forced to apologize for the mistake. It has not been able to confirm or deny if the feature might be coming in a future system update.

Some of Nintendo’s difficulties with the Switch 2 campaign seem due to the company being pushed outside its comfort zone, both by the nature of modern video game platforms and by the console’s relationship to its predecessor.

This is the first time Nintendo has ever marketed a console with a “2” in its name (although you could argue it has used words like “Super” and “Advance” similarly in the past). The company usually prefers to talk about innovative features and gameplay experiences rather than technical specs. But the pitch for Switch 2 is pretty straightforwardly “Switch, but more powerful,” and the console’s high price means its biggest market will likely be the core gaming demographic — one that’s used to comparing hardware specs before making purchases. So Nintendo has been forced to start talking about things like variable refresh rate, performance modes, and DLSS. It took the unusual step of making three hardware technicians the stars of the big Switch 2 reveal; in interviews and Q&A sessions, they seemed out of their depth, sharing dry, obviously scripted responses.

Tech fetishism is a weird look for Nintendo, but a command of the details is essential in a modern console launch. This is as much about continuity as novelty. Players want to know what’s new and what’s improved about the new console, but they also want to feel a seamless and reliable continuation of the experience they had on the previous one. Since backward compatibility with digital libraries became the default position with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, a whole series of new questions have been raised about new console platforms, including, notably: How will my old games be improved?

Nintendo’s innate pedantry and brand caution are a bad fit for the messaging challenge of a modern generational transition, where people crave simplicity but the answers to their questions can get quite complicated. That’s how we’ve ended up with a game called Super Mario Party Jamboree — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV. That’s why we have only this week seen footage of the free update to Pokémon Scarlet and Violet running much better on Switch 2 — something another manufacturer might have made a key selling point. That’s why we’re all still so confused about Virtual Game Cards*,* game-key cards, GameShare, and GameChat.

Will any of this matter? Has Nintendo blown it? Probably not. In the short term, the Switch 2 is all but guaranteed to sell out of its initial stock allocations. In the longer term, there are only two things that can sink it, and a fudged PR rollout isn’t likely to linger long enough in the collective memory to be one of them.

The first of those is if the experiences offered by the new console and its games are disappointing. It’s too early to say, but that seems unlikely. Initial responses to Mario Kart World suggest the game’s quality and scope will overwhelm concerns about its price, while the console and its features seem to have been engineered with typical attention to detail. And despite its complexities, there’s nothing about the Switch-to-Switch-2 transition that’ll be as alienating or confusing to the general public as the festival of cognitive dissonance that was the move from Wii to Wii U.

The second thing that might sink Switch 2 is its price. On this question, we probably won’t know the answer until next year, once Nintendo starts to run out of hardcore customers who were always going to buy one regardless. Amid a cost-of-living crisis, breaking the $400 barrier could really hurt Nintendo with its traditional family audience. At the same time, PlayStation 5 has been selling extremely well at a similar price point for over four years now. It’s more powerful, but history shows players place a value on portability — the original Switch launched at the same price as a PS4 Slim and did just fine.

Marketing a game console is a marathon, not a sprint. Soon, Switch 2 will be in our hands, and the controversy and confusion of the last eight weeks will be a distant memory. But if Nintendo is going to keep the Switch’s momentum rolling into the next generation, it clearly has a few things to learn.


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Metaphor: ReFantazio, the 2024 massive RPG hit made by Studio Zero and published by Atlus, sailed from critical acclaim to Game Awards glory to a marquee debut on Xbox Game Pass. The game’s legs are a testament to Katsura Hashino, Shigenori Soejima, and Shoji Meguro – the same folks responsible for the more recent Persona games – who elevated Metaphor into a work of art.

Metaphor was born from the team’s desire to create and understand what a “fantasy” is. An idea that, although one of the core themes in the narrative, has a more elegant representation in Metaphor: ReFantazio‘s Seeker Archetype.

There are many RPG games that use class systems – also called job systems to give players more space to be creative when it comes to combat. The concept has changed over the years from classes being tied to a character to classes working as shifting roles within a party. Even so, regardless of how innovative the list of classes in a game could sound, from Octopath Traveler‘s Starseer to Bravely Default‘s Performer, they are usually designed around their combat capabilities.

A Metaphor: ReFantazio screenshot showing a fight against the Homo Flaemo enemy, which has the form of a pair of ears with two humanoid figures next to it.

In Metaphor: ReFantazio, the Archetypes aren’t too different. Working similarly to other job systems, every character can learn all available Archetypes. Among them, we find some classic concepts, like Knight, Thief, Mage, and Healer. However, it is the initial Archetype given to the protagonist, the Seeker, where Metaphor‘s ideas shine. This Archetype is not meant to represent what the character does in combat, but how they see the world.

Earlier this year, we had the chance to send a few questions to Studio Zero and we asked them about this specific Archetype, which represents something far greater than just a play option.

“I think that to create a fantasy, you first need to be curious. You must push the boundaries of reality and imagine all kinds of things, like what it would be like if there was magic or monsters. I set the Seeker with the idea that the theme of this work, ‘the power to face anxiety’, comes from the idea that we should try to explore what kind of world it is for the people who live in it, and how it can be changed. I think this is connected to the sense of exploration that we wanted to have when we took on the fantasy genre.”

A Metaphor: ReFantazio screenshot showing the imagem of a person wearing a long hat and the character More talking about the Seeker Archetype.

As a combat stance, the Seeker causes Slash damage with their basic attack or Wind damage by using the Cyc magic. This Archetype also offers solid support skills for the first battles in the game, being capable of healing and buffing party members. But they haven’t been designed to represent a sword wielder or a duelist of some sort. Although useful in battle, the Seeker is above all the spirit of fantasy, the materialization of one’s capacity to fantasize.

By setting the Seeker as the protagonist’s signature Archetype, Studio Zero shows us how they used all elements in the game to make a claim about the game’s central themes. The willingness to challenge the unknown, and to look for what one desires, is what the Seeker represents. Their fighting capabilities are secondary, the methods given to them to accomplish such ideals.

The Seeker is the quintessential representation of the ideas behind Metaphor: ReFantazio. That’s exactly what fantasizing means and the conclusion Studio Zero arrived at after completing this project. By understanding it not as a noun, but as a verb, Studio Zero invites us to fantasize about a better world and to seek it wherever and however we can.


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The success of Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 Predator movie Prey seems to have been a wake-up call for 20th Century Studios, a reminder both that there was still life in the franchise, and that approaching it in a way audiences had never seen before could pay off. The studio effectively handed the franchise over to Trachtenberg, who co-wrote and co-directed the animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers, hitting Hulu on June 6, and directed Predator: Badlands, a Nov. 2025 movie that turns a young Predator into a protagonist.

While Trachtenberg is obviously drawing heavily on his own Predator franchise fandom, we weren’t expecting to talk to him about Killer of Killers and find out that one of the movies most on his mind in conceiving the animated project was Christopher Guest’s 2000 ensemble comedy Best in Show.

“I haven’t thought about this for a while,” Trachtenberg told Polygon via Zoom. “But Best in Show was very much a part of [my thinking] when we were making it. Because in that movie, being a comedy, you bond with the characters in a very unique way. And when you get to the end, you realize, Wait, I don’t want [any of them to beat the others]. It’s not like any other sports movie, where you have your protagonist, and you’re rooting for them to win.”

Best in Show follows a group of entrants and other peripheral characters at the Mayflower Dog Show, a competitive pageant full of eccentrics and dog obsessives. Predator: Killer of Killers, for its part, follows three characters from three different eras: a Viking raider obsessed with avenging her father’s murderer, a Japanese nobleman who becomes a ninja to defend his honor from his samurai brother, and a World War II pilot with a knack for machinery. Each of them faces a Predator in their own era and homeland; each in turn is then preserved to fight a final battle for a Predator audience.

Trachtenberg isn’t pointing at specific story parallels between the two movies — just an overall sense of structure he admired in Best in Show.

“It’s like — wait, I like that person. I like that person. I like that person. — I don’t want anyone to be the winner!” he says. “And so that was the fun of [Killer of Killers]. If you bond with all three of them, you don’t want any of them to beat each other.”

As far as the animated look of the movie goes, though, he says he and co-director Joshua Wassung learned more from Netflix’s animated series Arcane. Where Arcane was made with familiar digital animation industry programs like Maya and Nuke, though, Killer of Killers was designed in Unreal Engine.

“That’s one of the unique things about it — to be start to finish in Unreal is pretty special,” Trachtenberg says. “Arcane was a big reference, and we did have some artists from that series.” Most notably, Steven J. Meyer, credited as Arcane’s lead animator, was Trachtenberg and Wassung’s head of character animation.

But ultimately, Trachtenberg says, the non-Predator movie he was thinking about most when making Killer of Killers was Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 anime classic Akira. Again, that wasn’t about specific story parallels — it was about how Akira made Trachtenberg feel when he first encountered it as a kid.

“I distinctly remember I was way too young to see it, and I convinced my mom to buy it for me,” he says. “It had a parental advisory sticker on it — at Suncoast, they didn’t let you buy the movie unless there was someone old enough [with you]. So I convinced my mom — she thought it was just a cartoon, it’d be fine.”

Trachtenberg’s mother clearly wasn’t aware that Akira starts with an intense street war between biker gangs, and goes on to include a wide variety of violence, from a trippy, surrealist dream attack to the brutal death of a young woman. “It really blew my mind, for obvious reasons,” Trachtenberg says. “One thing was just how emotionally intense it was. I don’t think I’d seen very many movies that were that adult thematically at the age I was, on top of action like I had never [seen before].”

He describes his response to the end of that opening bike chase as, “I can’t believe I just saw what I saw, and that it moved the way it moved, and felt the way it felt.” That response, he says, was a major reason he wanted Killer of Killers to be animated.

“There are certain things you can only get away with if they’re animated,” he says. “So that was more the inspiration — trying to recapture that feeling, and simultaneously make it very cinematic, just as I would any live action movie, and be classical in many ways. But moment to moment, to indulge in the animation. I certainly wouldn’t, in a live-action movie, stick a guy on the wing of a plane, trying to fix it in a mid-air battle, or do a trench run through the streets of Casablanca. I think it would be a little goofy in live action. But animated, it’s so whimsical and fun. And all the gore and the violence — to express that the way we do, that was really the draw and the inspiration. It was really just indulging in it all.”

Predator: Killer of Killers debuts on Hulu on June 6.


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Thousands of games will be backwards compatible with the Nintendo Switch 2 — but streaming apps are getting left behind.

Ahead of the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch on June 5, players are keeping an eagle-eye on Nintendo’s compatibility page, which lists how many games have been tested for compatibility with the new console.

As of May 27, the vast majority of Nintendo’s own games, and its third-party games, will be playable on the Switch 2 — great news for players who have built up a library of Switch games, but are ready for a console upgrade.

What’s not making the leap are streaming apps like Crunchyroll and Hulu, as well as the comics reader Inkypen. These apps aren’t compatible with the Switch 2, and it’s not immediately clear if new versions are in development.

Nintendo committed to making its games backwards compatible months before the Switch 2 was even announced. In an “Ask the Developer” interview on Nintendo’s site, senior director Takuhiro Dohta and general manager Tetsuya Sasaki discussed the process. They said that because the Nintendo Switch and the Nintendo Switch 2 don’t share any hardware, the team has had to find creative solutions to backwards compatibility.

“If we tried to use technology like software emulators, we’d have to run Switch 2 at full capacity, but that would mean the battery wouldn’t last so long,” Dohta said. “So we did something that’s somewhere in between a software emulator and hardware compatibility.”

“We weren’t so confident at first, but as we tested games one by one, we found out that some issues could be solved by making improvements,” said Sasaku. “This process helped us build confidence that, while we might not be able to solve everything, we can work it out for many games.”

We reached out to Nintendo, Hulu, and Crunchyroll for comment on whether or not Switch 2 versions of streaming apps are in the works, but we haven’t heard back at the time of publication.


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When Duolingo launched in 2012, the language-learning app became the poster child of gamification. The app is shameless and magnificent in its efforts to get users hooked on lessons with streaks, leaderboards, and timed challenges.

Many users — including me and my 1300-plus day streak — fell for Duolingo’s cartoon mascots and bizarre social media posts. The company has never been afraid to be belligerent in tone; Duo the owl is cute, but Duolingo has adopted a successful strategy of not coddling its users. The app regularly sends me push notifications from my own boyfriend begging me not to let us “break up” (our friend streak). Look, it doesn’t not work.

But this spring, Duolingo had a huge messaging misfire over AI adoption, and brought a lot more users close to ending things.

In April, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announced to employees that Duolingo would be going all-in on AI. The company would look for AI expertise in future hires, and AI usage would be evaluated in employee performance reviews. It would also move to replace contract workers with AI where possible. It was this statement that stuck in the craw of many users, and honestly surprised me when I read it. I’m cynically certain that plenty of companies would love to replace expensive human workers with machines. Admitting it is another thing.

The memo was a called shot: Duolingo’s leadership sees AI as a paradigm shift, similar to the adoption of mobile phones in the 2010s. At the time, common wisdom would have dictated that a language-learning program should prioritize widely adopted platforms like PCs. Instead, the company went “mobile-first.” That bet certainly paid off. Duolingo saw 103 million users a month in 2024. Now, it wants to go “AI-first.”

It’s too soon to tell what the long-term effects of the decision will be. But in the short term, fallout has been loud and angry across social media. Longtime users are deleting the app, destroying 1000+ day streaks. The announcement has been painted as a failure in multiple publications. The Duolingo subreddit melted down so thoroughly that mods placed a moratorium on posts about AI.

Meanwhile, Duolingo stock prices have soared to over $500 (as of June 2, 2025), indicating that whatever users may feel about AI, the big boys who shovel money around think it’s here to stay.

Von Ahn later made a second statement, not walking back the “AI-first” shift, but couching it in gentler language.

“I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do,” he wrote. “I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.”

Duolingo isn’t the only company doing this. Across the tech industry, workers are being evaluated on their AI usage, encouraged to experiment with AI tools in the service of supposed future productivity, and asked to train their own replacements.

It’s not being framed this way. Rather, executives are speaking about their AI initiatives like Luis von Ahn did: as tools to help people, rather than replace them.

Duolingo’s AI shift has been brewing for years

Of course, Duolingo has been inching towards “AI-first” for years. In 2023, it used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create AI features that are only available in Duolingo Max, the highest subscription tier on the app.

One of these is “Explain My Answer,” which ostensibly tells users why their response to an exercise is wrong. In general, Duolingo will give you the correct answer if you get something wrong, but it won’t explain why you were wrong. When it comes to typos or misspellings, the error can be obvious. But it doesn’t help users if they’re fundamentally misunderstanding, say, a grammatical concept.

Previously, Duolingo hosted a forum where users could see explanations from other users and native speakers directly in the app. This was removed in 2022.

Now, the Duolingo subreddit is awash with users looking for answers to their questions. And many of them are blaming AI for their confusion. It’s is the scapegoat for nonsensical conversations, translation errors, and just plain awkward exercises.

Without confirmation from Duolingo, it’s impossible to say which of these issues is actually caused by Duolingo’s implementation of AI. In some cases, users are genuinely encountering software bugs rather than AI-created lessons.

But elsewhere, AI has genuinely changed Duolingo’s lessons for the worse. In Aftermath, Riley MacCleod writes that the Irish course he was pursuing has been ruined by AI voices that don’t pronounce Irish words correctly — a dire situation for a language that is literally endangered.

I spoke to Callie R., a former Duolingo user who is learning Japanese. They noticed that there was a mismatch between how words were pronounced by the robotic voiceover in word banks, versus how those same words were pronounced in exercises.

“This is just an aspect of how Japanese is written, that it isn’t possible in general to tell how a kanji is supposed to be pronounced when you see it in isolation,” Callie said. “It makes sense that an automated content generation process would make this kind of mistake, but a human team actively developing the course with learning outcomes in mind would not do this.”

They also pointed to observations from other users that Duolingo’s robotic voice isn’t capable of correctly speaking a Japanese pitch-accent, a crucial aspect of the language, and one that a native English speaker can’t easily pick up on.

“It wasn’t worth literally learning the language wrong on purpose,” they said.

After two years, Callie R. deleted the app and nuked their 700+ day streak.

AI should be good at this

The thing is, language learning is a field where AI large language models can actually be useful. These LLMs aren’t reliable truth-tellers, but they can be functional conversation partners.

Duolingo has long been criticized for not effectively teaching users how to speak — the app naturally focuses more on reading and listening, and the “speaking” lessons are more about pronunciation than they are about actively recalling words from memory. The latter is critical for genuine fluency in another language.

Duolingo is trying to address that flaw with two more Max-exclusive AI features that let users have conversations with Duolingo’s cartoon mascots. The most impactful of these is Video Call, where users can have a brief “phone call” with Lily, Duolingo’s resident depressed goth girl.

I had some conversations with Lily during a Duolingo Max free trial earlier this year. In each, she would ask me a question, repeat back to me what she had understood from my response, and then ask a simple follow-up. We talked about things like what animals or fruits I liked, or how my vacation was going. It forced me to recall Italian vocabulary on the fly, without a word bank to help me out.

A screenshot of the Duolingo Video Call feature, with Lily the purple-loving emo teen.

This is an area where LLMs excel: generating human language based on speech patterns.

Unfortunately, LLMs fail in exactly the areas Duolingo is trying to disrupt. In his Blood in the Machine newsletter, journalist Brian Merchant spoke with a former Duolingo employee whose job had gone from writing lessons, to training AI how to write lessons, to non-existent.

“We had been working with their AI tool for a while, and it was absolutely not at the point of being capable of writing lessons without humans,” this employee told Merchant.

For Duolingo’s leadership, the flaws in the system are the cost of what they see as the cutting edge. Duolingo’s lessons are not supposed to be good.

“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in his email to Duolingo employees. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

The users who remain tapped into these conversations are suffering no small amount of confusion. A recent study showed that admitting to AI usage can cause people to trust you less. This is the situation that seems to be playing out on the Duolingo subreddit, where users are in a constant battle to figure out what is AI and what isn’t.

Some are deleting the app like Callie R. did. But there is a bubbling fear that a silent majority may simply not care or even be aware of any of these issues. The Duolingo subreddit has over 508,000 members — that’s less than 5% of Duolingo’s reported 116 million monthly users. And the subreddit itself isn’t entirely anti-AI. Plenty of users accept it, or simply don’t think there’s any point in fighting the tide.

Duolingo’s AI policy calls the app’s mission into question

My own Duolingo usage has always been predicated on one assumption: it won’t hurt your language-learning. Plenty of ink has been spilled over the fact that Duolingo most likely can’t make you fluent in another language. Sure, I’ve always reasoned, I know that. But doing a 5-minute Italian exercise every day when I’m too lazy or cheap or unmotivated to seek out a tutor is better than nothing. I am still learning, even if I’m not exactly leaping and bounding towards fluency.

But the influx of AI content puts this justification at risk. After all, language students don’t know what they don’t know.

“I don’t really care that it’s AI as long as there’s oversight and someone willing to pull the plug if it’s not producing real Japanese,” Callie R. said. Instead of pulling the plug, the people in charge at Duolingo are actively enabling users to learn bad Japanese, in the hopes that someday the AI will teach good Japanese instead.

There’s no obvious road map is to get there. LLMs can be taught to speak a language — it’s not clear that they can be taught to teach.

Duo the owl surrounded by people at Duolingo’s IPO launch in Times Square.

Duolingo is facing a problem of scale: it wants to offer lots of language courses, and creating those courses takes time and money. It has turned to AI to fill the desperate gaps where humans might be right, but can never be fast enough.

What makes Duolingo’s AI creep even more nefarious is that it’s most likely to affect languages with smaller userbases — like Irish or Navajo, both endangered languages. The vast majority of the app’s users are studying English, French, or Spanish. These are the courses that see a real investment of resources.

Duolingo gets great press for creating lessons that purport to familiarize users with Navajo. But what will happen if AI is used to “scale up” the Navajo program, with seemingly few human guardrails to ensure that the exercises are correct?

“Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners,” von Ahn wrote in his first statement. “We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

My question is… why? Why do we need more content for users immediately, when that content might be wrong or of low quality? It’s here that Duolingo’s mission of making language accessible crashes headlong into its role as a publicly traded company. Lessons need to scale so that users stay on the app, so that the app can make money.

Actually learning a language — or even simply treading water in one — doesn’t have a part to play.


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Marvel released a new trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps on Wednesday. And, sure, you can now buy tickets ahead of its July 25 release. But what’s more important than all that? Popcorn buckets, baby — especially when they give us our best look a character yet.

Like many recent blockbusters, The Fantastic Four will be receiving a commemorative popcorn bucket in the shape of Galactus’ head. “The universe’s biggest popcorn vessel” stands 17.5 inches tall and is 20 inches wide, so have fun dealing with that while you watch what stands to be one of Marvel’s most important films this side of Avengers: Endgame.

While the trailers for The Fantastic Four have been careful not to spoil the full reveal of Galactus’ design, sticking to his shadow and city-block-sized foot, Marvel spilled the popcorn (heh) on what the planet devourer will look like via bucket reveal. Going by the bucket, Galactus will sport a look that adheres to his comics design, like how Wolverine ditched black leather for yellow spandex in last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Gone are the days of clouds as planet-eating villains.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps will introduce Marvel’s First Family to the MCU via an alternate universe. It stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, and Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer. And based on the post-credits scene for Thunderbolts*, it’s just the beginning of their run in Marvel movies.


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Wylder’s Remembrance quests in Elden Ring Nightreign don’t just give you more context to Wylder as a character — they also provide you with some of his best relics. Completing these quests involves spelunking in mines and exploring forsaken cities, but you can tackle them alongside your normal expeditions against the Nightlords.

Here’s our in-progress Wylder Remembrance quest walkthrough for Elden Ring Nightreign, explaining how to start Wylder’s Remembrance quest and how to complete each task along the way.

How to start Wylder’s Remembrance quest in Elden Ring Nightreign

Wylder’s Remembrance quest begins in his journal’s third chapter; if you haven’t unlocked this chapter yet in your playthrough, you can do so by playing expeditions as the character until it unlocks.

In our experience, a new chapter shows up after completing one or two expeditions as Wylder. It also seems that all expedition outcomes count, regardless of whether you played solo or multiplayer, or if you won or lost; the chapter will unlock eventually.

When you check Wylder’s journal after you return to Roundtable Hold from an expedition, if you can access the Chapter 3 entry, you will notice a button that allows you to “begin Remembrance.” Upon selection, you’ll enter a memory that locks you as Wylder for the duration. If you want to come back to the remembrance quest, you can do so without penalty. However, once you start a Remembrance quest that requires you to complete an objective in expeditions, it’s essential to know that Nightreign only allows one personal objective per expedition.

If you team up with someone else who’s also pursuing their Remembrance quest, there’s a chance your objective will not be the one that shows on the map.

Chapter 3: Find a whetstone in Limveld

Speak with the Iron Menial in Rountable Hold to start Wylder’s first quest. He tasks you with finding a whetstone in Limveld.

Start an expedition, and check your map for a red quest icon. It will point out a specific mine for you to enter, which will lead you to the mini-boss guarding the whetstone. You can find this boss by searching for glowing rocks deep inside the mine, and you’ll know you’ve seen it once a Tunnel Crystalian spawns in front of the objective.

Tunnel Crystalian is no different from the other Crystalians you most likely have already faced in your runs. You can likely take it down solo, at a low level, and with your starting weapon. Once defeated, the whetstone is available for pickup right behind where the crystalian spawned.

Once you receive the Slate Whetstone, you can return it to the Menial and exhaust his dialogue. A few rewards for you to grab on the table nearby, with one of them being the Mended Earring.

Pulling up the Roundtable Hold menu will point out your next destination, the study. Once there, you’ll be able to hold the earring into the light filtering in from above, revealing some lore. After you’re finished studying, you finally return the Mended Earring to the Duchess and conclude the first part of Wylder’s Remembrance quest. Upon completion, you’ll receive the Slate Whetstone Relic, which grants Wylder the ability to follow up with his Character Skill when wielding a greatsword as well as a boost to physical attack.

Chapter 5: The Roundtable Crypt

Once you unlock the fifth chapter in Wylder’s Journal, you’ll be able to begin the second part of his remembrance quest.

Upon entry into the memory, open your map and follow the exclamation point in the west hall. Once there, you’ll be in a room with glowing notes along the walls. Interact with all three of them, and you’ll lose control of your character as the sound of a heavy door opening rings out.

The door that opens leads to a crypt, and unfortunately, it doesn’t appear on the Roundtable Hold map. To find this room, in the west hall, go down the stairs, turn left, and then go down the next set of stairs to see the open door. Inside, you’re met by the Iron Menial with more dialogue for you to exhaust.

After, you’ll repeat the same task of examining the glowing notes in the crypt. This will provide some information about Duchess, your fellow Nightfarer, and the next step is to find her on the beach south of the Roundtable. Exhaust her dialogue, and that will be the conclusion of this stage of Wylder’s remembrance quest.

Completing these steps grants you the Wylder’s Chalice, which allows you to attach different colored relics to Wylder specifically. The Wylder’s Chalice allows for a red relic, a yellow relic, and one of any color.

We’re still working on the final two chapters of Wylder’s remembrance quest and will update this guide with the required steps (and rewards!) soon.

For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, how to unlock the Duchess and Revenant, and the best early Duchess build.


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Elden Ring Nightreign has shot out of the gates, selling 2 million copies its first day, yet the critical and player reception hasn’t reached the same highs that most of FromSoftware’s games do. Matchmaking in Nightreign is something of a challenge: you literally can’t quit it, and the game isn’t balanced for solo play, despite efforts with a recent patch. If you loved Elden Ring, but are finding that its spinoff isn’t landing for you, here’s a rec: go back in time and give Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons a shot.

Hunters still return to Yharnam each year in March to celebrate Bloodborne’s anniversary (10 years ago now!), and we still hold out hope for a sequel that might never come. When discussing Bloodborne, however, one thing that doesn’t get mentioned enough are its Chalice Dungeons. They are in some ways a proof of concept for FromSoftware’s weird multiplayer experiments beyond summons and invasions.

Chalice Dungeons offer hunters procedurally generated levels of varying difficulties. You can successfully tackle them solo or play as a pair with a buddy (unlike Elden Ring Nightreign, which doesn’t support two-player co-op… yet). They include tough bosses, mobs of enemies, and all the bullshit ways FromSoft enjoys killing you. This weekend I died to a hiding skeletal enemy who threw flame vials at me and to a mob of enemies who were unexpectedly summoned after I stepped on a tile.

Similar to Nightreign, which returns old Dark Souls bosses to the fray, hunters can find already-bested Bloodborne bosses in the Dungeons, like Rom or the Blood-Starved Beast. For trophy hunters, you’ll need to scour the depths of the game’s Chalice Dungeons to find Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen, and defeat her on your quest for the game’s Platinum.

Perhaps the best thing about Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons is that they’re included as part of the base game. During or after your 50-hour journey through Yharnam, you can take a detour through some randomized dungeons at no extra cost. With Nightreign, the feeling of “This couldn’t have been a free update?” is hard to shake.

Both Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons and Elden Ring Nightreign show FromSoftware isn’t afraid to experiment within its tried-and-true Soulsborne formula, and it’ll experiment further with next year’s The Duskbloods, exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2. “Not Bloodborne II” will feature PvPvE online multiplayer “for a broad range of game-design ideas, while also letting us leverage our experience of designing challenging enemy encounters,” according to director Hidetaka Miyazaki. The Duskbloods will make for back-to-back experimental multiplayer releases for the studio, leaving fans wondering when its next big single-player adventure will drop.

At the moment, though, FromSoftware is going all-in on multiplayer releases. So if Elden Ring Nightreign ain’t for you, Yharnam will always be there waiting, good hunter.


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A figure floats in the air above a ritual circle observed by two people in cowboy hats in art from the TTRPG We Deal in Lead.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has destroyed or damaged many of the country’s medical facilities. You can help buy new medical equipment and support ambulance crews, doctors, and hospital staff with an $8 benefit bundle containing more than 250 tabletop role-playing game titles from independent creators. The project aims to raise $100,000 for the Serhiy Prytula Humanitarian Foundation, which has been providing services to Ukraine’s front line and to de-occupied areas to deliver essential medicine and treatment.

No matter what your favorite TTRPG genre is, there’s something to enjoy in this bundle. Inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, the weird Western We Deal in Leadfeatures an introductory scenario, making it easy to dive into the lightweight system, and a companion soundtrack to set the mood. If you can’t get a session on the schedule, there’s a solo mode using Tarot cards.

Another highlight is Mausritter, a Redwall-style fantasy adventure built around the Into the Odd ruleset. Character creation is very quick, and there are plenty of tools for game masters to generate stories for rodent-sized adventures.

FIST: Ultra Editioncosts $10 by itself, making it an especially good deal in this bundle. The game, designed for fans of Doom Patrol, Metal Gear Solid, and The A-Team, casts players as members of the Freelance Infantry Strike Team, dealing with paranormal secrets in the Cold War, including mutants, aliens and werewolves.

Itch.io’s Bundle for Ukrainian Hospitals bundle will be available for purchase through June 30.


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Fortnite officially arrives on the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5, according to Epic Games. The optimized release comes complete with visual enhancements, technical improvements, and fresh control options that take advantage of the new hardware.

Nintendo’s new Joy-Con 2 controllers introduce mouse-style controls, and the feature will be enabled on Fortnite on June 7 with patch 36.00. Players will be able to use one or both Joy-Con 2 controllers as a mouse to aim and navigate the game’s UI, so expect some sweaty competition. When using this control scheme, the right analog stick will be disabled, and rotation will be handled by physically moving the controller like a mouse. A visible cursor will appear on-screen during navigation.

Depending on the configuration, the ZR button (or ZL if using the left controller) will act as the primary click. Players can enable mouse controls by heading into the Settings menu, finding the Mouse tab, and selecting Right, Left, or Both under “Mouse Controls.” For those using the left controller as a mouse, Epic recommends enabling the Swap Movement Thumbstick setting to allow character movement with the right stick instead, something that should help left-handed players feel more comfortable.

Fortnite also now runs at a potential 60 frames per second on the Nintendo Switch 2. The visual fidelity has been significantly upgraded as well, with the game running at 2176×1224 resolution while docked and 1600×900 in handheld mode. This improvement is coupled with greater view distances, allowing players to see more of the environment from farther away.

Players should also notice higher-quality textures, more dynamic and realistic shadows, and much better water rendering. The developers even enabled clothing physics for added immersion, giving character outfits more realistic movement during gameplay.

Fortnite’s replay system also makes a return on the Nintendo Switch 2, letting players rewatch their best (or worst) Battle Royale moments from different angles. In addition, gameplay can now be captured easily using the Switch 2’s built-in Capture button. GameChat is supported as well, allowing voice chat with up to three friends while broadcasting gameplay.

Fortnite on Nintendo Switch 2 includes the full desktop renderer “for the hardcore tech folks,” according to Epic Games. This version of the game supports high-detail geometry, distance field ambient occlusion while docked, shadow-casting point lights, and high-quality visual effects. Epic states, “Fortnite on Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t just a port — it’s a reimagined experience.” As such, players who log into Fortnite on Nintendo Switch 2 between now and March 31, 2026, will receive the exclusive Wishing Star Emote.

Mouse controls will be available across all Battle Royale modes starting June 7, including traditional Battle Royale, Zero Build, Team Rumble, Reload, Fortnite OG, and their respective Zero Build variants. Although this is a great addition to the game, we’ve tested Nintendo’s Joy-Con 2s, and they left a bit to be desired.


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No Man’s Sky is nowhere close to winding down even nine years after it was first released — and the newest update, available June 4, adds totally new gameplay mechanics and compatibility with the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 console. Even better, the Switch 2 Edition is free for players who already own No Man’s Sky for Switch.

Dubbed the Beacon update by developer-publisher Hello Games, this free update is as important for existing PC and console players as it is for prospective players receiving their Switch 2 in the mail on Thursday. The update adds what is essentially a city-builder within No Man’s Sky, “bringing towns and their management” to the game, according to a news release.

Here are the gameplay updates, in full:

Players can become town mayor and take ownership of multiple settlements. You can construct buildings and upgrade each one, with new building types like jukebox bars where you can choose the music, merchants where you can build custom starships or even ponds you can chill and fish at.

Each inhabitant can be conversed with, with their own abilities and attributes to manage. As town mayor you’ll be enlisted to welcome new settlers, resolve disputes, and make choices to create prosperity.

A well managed settlement can make their owners rich in resources, but they need to be protected. Travellers can hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates.

That means the players who enjoy the surprisingly cozy elements of No Man’s Sky will have plenty to do beyond the somewhat limited base-building options. It also adds a new element of space combat, arguably one of the biggest draws of the game, in the form of the wingmen.

As for Switch 2 support, it’s not just a box to check — Hello Games says it’s spent a year making sure the game “feel at home on Switch 2,” pushing beyond the self-described “technical miracle” that was getting No Man’s Sky on the original Switch. The fine-tuned upgrades for the Switch 2 Edition include better resolution and frame rate, high-res texture support, and higher pixel density, as well as support for touchscreen and cross-saves.

“For the last year we’ve had this secret room with some Switch 2 dev-kits from Nintendo,” Hello Games said in its release. “New platforms are always exciting and our small team has loved pushing the new hardware to its limits.”

If you haven’t played No Man’s Sky yet, or soured on it before any of the last several updates, it’s well worth diving back in despite the game’s age. In fact, its age is a boon in this case, since Hello Games has taken every opportunity to update the procedurally generated world using player feedback and ultimately getting closer and closer to realizing the true vision for the game.

I just picked up No Man’s Sky for the first time a few weeks ago (unrelated to this update, which I haven’t played yet) and have yet to reopen my other long-running games since. It’s endlessly exploratory and beautiful to look at, not to mention a testament to the devs’ commitment to their expansive, ambitious project.

No Man’s Sky’s Beacon update is available on June 4 for Mac, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. It will be available for Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5 when the Switch 2 is released.


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D&D fans who had their first look at the newly announced game Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked from Resolution Games may have experienced deja vu. The upcoming project, based on the Demeo Action Roleplaying System, looks and feels a lot like another product that was recently officially canceled by Wizards of the Coast: the VTT (virtual tabletop) Sigil. While there is no correlation between the two products, it’s still an interesting coincidence.

Sigil was supposed to revolutionize the way that Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s most successful tabletop role-playing game (for the moment), is experienced. Promising an immersive, fully 3D virtual tabletop experience, Sigil’s development was followed with great interest by the fandom, only to see those hopes crushed by its cancellation just one month after launch.

First announced in 2022, Sigil was developed with Unreal Engine 5, and it was supposed to bridge the gap between hardcore tabletop D&D players and the more casual video game fans who may have heard about the game through Stranger Things, Critical Role, or Baldur’s Gate 3, which had been in early access since October 2020. However, after years of development issues, Wizards officially canceled the project in March 2025, because, according to an email circulated to D&D staff by Dan Rawson, the senior vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons, “After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a larger, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized.”

Three months later, the first look at Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked hints that at least some of the promises of Project Sigil will be realized, just in a completely different format. According to game director Gustav Stenmark, “We are trying to emulate the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. But in this game, no one needs to be the DM, instead, the game will do all of that stuff for you.” In Battlemarked, 1-4 players will take control of their characters, represented by miniatures, and move them on a map, fighting monsters and completing quests, using the same rules as the tabletop version of D&D.

This is exactly what Sigil wanted to accomplish, with the difference that a Dungeon Master was present, and the game was supposed to be entirely customizable to fit any adventure or campaign the users wanted to play. While it’s unclear from the information released at the moment, Battlemarked will likely have its own specific campaign and limited customization options. Otherwise, it would be just another version of Sigil, but outsourced to an external developer. For reference, the in-house development team for Sigil was laid off in March of 2025.

It’s hard to predict how fans of Dungeons & Dragons will react to Battlemarked. Wizards is currently facing backlash on many fronts, as the latest edition of D&D, released this year, was received with raised eyebrows. In April, Christopher Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, respectively the creative director and the game director for Dungeons & Dragons, left the team, officially on their own terms and volition, to move on to other projects. Still, the three main people behind D&D’s Fifth Edition (Mike Mearls left Wizards in 2024 for Chaosium) are now out the door, with a brand-new edition around that is not meeting fans’ expectations, to say the least.

Truth be told, Project Sigil seemed doomed from the beginning. While the promise to play D&D in a 3D and fully customizable environment was enticing, it required a dedicated client software and a D&D Beyond (the official D&D digital toolset and game companion) account to function, which already put it at a disadvantage compared to other popular VTTs, such as Roll20. Also, Wizards’ purpose of bringing video game players to tabletop D&D was likely accomplished by the extraordinary success of Baldur’s Gate 3 already. It’s not a coincidence that Sigil’s trailer from D&D Direct 2024 began with the voiceover saying, “So many of us have played Baldur’s Gate 3. This is the opportunity for people to play their adventures in this new way to play D&D.”

Fans curious to see how Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked will play can check Demeo, Resolution Games’ tabletop-inspired co-op game. However, Gustav Stenmark specified that “Demeo is more of a rougelike game, whereas Battlemarked focuses more on the story and the campaign.”

Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked will eventually be available on PC, console, and XR devices.


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Nintendo Switch 2 players will be minding the speed limit in Mario Kart World after the console launches this week because the game will ship without the series’ notoriously fast engine class.

As reported by Rolling Stone, the aggressively brisk mode won’t be making a return for Mario Kart World, though Nintendo isn’t ruling out the possibility in a future update. Mario Kart 8 initially shipped without 200cc, only to be updated later.

“Some players are really happy with the addition of high difficulty modes likes this,” Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki tells Rolling Stone, when asked if Nintendo would consider adding 200cc post-launch. “However, does that mean we’re going to consider adding engine sizes that are larger than 150cc to *Mario Kart World?*I’m afraid I can’t say just yet.”

200cc was introduced in the wildly popular Mario Kart 8, where its challenging nature quickly became the bane of some people’s existence. Simply put, it was a wickedly rapid mode — almost too swift, some argued. These critics would later be vindicated as fans crunched the numbers and found that the number was misleading; what was labeled “200cc” was actually, relatively speaking, 415cc.

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But the version of Mario Kart World people play on June 5 won’t have 200cc in any form. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a great thing or a terrible thing. On social media sites like X, some are happy to see a mode they deem “garbage” and “ass” gone.

There as just as many people who are appalled by its omission, for a variety of reasons. Price is one of the most prevalent criticisms, with fans noting that it seems egregious to charge so much for a game that perceivably has less features than its predecessor. Switch 2 games will be more expensive than Switch 1 games.

“I’m excited for the game but for $80 things that have been in MK8 for years are missing? Come on,” reads one comment on a Reddit thread discussing the omission.

Others are saddened by the news because the open world and its long straightaways seemed suited for 200cc. “…so you mean to tell me after months of everyone including myself justifying how empty the tracks felt with ‘oh that’s cause it’s built for 200cc’ the game doesn’t even have it” says an exasperated user on X.

Players are also disappointed to hear 200cc is gone because the mode upped the competitive nature Mario Kart by allowing for more types of shortcuts and strategies, like brake drifting. Mario Kart World’s inclusion of mechanics like wall riding could have even more complexity at higher speeds. By the same measure, some new design ideas like rewinding time would literally negate 200cc’s incredible pace, so balancing the high engine class seems tricky.

The most sensible reactions to this news point out that 200cc was never balanced to begin with, and that Mario Kart 8’s version of it was over twice as fast as it was supposed to be. Would Mario Kart World’s theoretical 200cc even be accurate? If Nintendo brought it back properly, 200cc in Mario Kart World may not replicate the punishing experience people are yearning for anyway.

Maybe it’s for the best. Toad’s delicate constitution was not made to withstand eating a cheeseburger at 200 mph.


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