Stellar Blade’s ‘Censorship’ Circus, Remembering The First Sonic Trailer Five Years Later, And More Of The Week’s Gaming Opinions
Image: Shift Up / Sony, Atlus, Kotaku / SB Arts Media (Shutterstock), Fellow Traveller, HoYoverse, Donāt Nod Entertainment, Bethesda Softworks, Screenshot: Paramount / Kotaku
This week, debates raged about supposed censorship in Stellar Blade. We also took a look at the upcoming game from the makers of Life Is Strange, remembered how the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog, with its, uhh…unsettling take on the character…broke the internet five years ago, and more.Ā
Image: Shift Up / Sony
Stellar Blade is a PlayStation 5 sci-fi action exclusive about fighting monsters and saving humanity in a stylish post-apocalyptic world. So why are thousands of its self-identified fans signing a petition to āFree Stellar Bladeā from censorship? The answer is surprisingly complicated and kind of sad. – Ethan Gach Read More
Image: Atlus
The video game industry has habitually repackaged things and put them on store shelves. Remakes and remasters are one side of the conversation, but Atlus, it seems, prefers to release āenhanced editionsā like Persona 5 Royal and now Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. These add new content and major quality-of-life overhauls, all for the hefty price of a brand-new game with no way for owners of the original to simply upgrade to the new version at a reduced price. When I got the chance to play through two hours of Vengeance, I was intrigued to get a sense of what Atlus has deemed merited a whole new video game. But Iām wrestling with how I feel about the companyās method of delivery. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Image: Kotaku / SB Arts Media (Shutterstock)
While recent big-budget, $60+ games like Suicide Squad and Immortals of Aveum seem unable to find success, many smaller and weirder titles are exploding on Steam and developing large communities around them. Games like Helldivers 2, Palworld, Lethal Company, and Sons of the Forest are all major standouts for this year. And what do these games have in common? A cheaper price tag. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Screenshot: Paramount / Kotaku
Looking at the original trailer for the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie is like looking into a portal to a different timeline, one where the film itself likely doesnāt herald the arrival of a massively successful film franchise that eventually spawns a bad Paramount+ spin-off. At best, it results in a Morbius-level hate-watch campaign and goes down in history as a great affront to the titular blue blur. But itās been five years since that first trailer, showing a hedgehog who looked more like a human child in cosplay than the beloved video game hero, broke the internet, and itās fascinating to look back and remember just how disastrous that original look really was. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Image: Fellow Traveller
Just in time for its second anniversary, indie RPG Citizen Sleeper is getting a tabletop RPG (TTRPG) actual play set in the gameās universe. A collaboration between developer Jump Over The Age and games journalist Quintin Smith (of People Make Games), the actual play will air on May 7. Itās an exciting celebration for fans of 2022ās most underrated and unconventional RPG. But Iām here to tell anyone who hasnāt played Citizen Sleeper yet why they need to experience it ASAP. – Willa Rowe Read More
Image: HoYoverse
During Honkai: Star Railās Cosmodessy event, players were treated to a little personality test. Over the course of the minigame youād be asked a series of questions, and in the end, based on your answers, youād be assigned a personality linked to a game character. But the characters in the test werenāt the gameās main cast of characters like March 7th or Dan Heng; rather, they were characters from the gameās lore. One of these characters is a sentient capybara, and I need answers. – Willa Rowe Read More
Image: Donāt Nod Entertainment
The Life Is Strange series started as French developer Donāt Nodās baby back when the first gameās episodic rollout began in 2015. After two games, publisher Square Enix has placed the franchise in the hands of Deck Nine Games, which worked on the prequel Before the Storm and the most recent game in the series, True Colors. Donāt Nod, meanwhile, announced itās working on another adventure series about teenagers, relationships, and supernatural elements in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. When Kotaku got to talk with creative director Michel Koch and executive producer Luc Baghadoust, we had to ask: If all these similar ingredients are in the pot, why is Donāt Nod not simply cooking up a new Life is Strange game? It sounds like working with the seriesā publisher made it difficult for the team to tell the stories it wanted to tell. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Gif: Square Enix / Shift Up / Claire Jackson / Kotaku
Over the weekend I spent a fair bit of time playing Stellar Blade, enjoying the action while doing my best to ignore the Discourseā¢. But that fun was killed when the game asked me to start moving around random boxes to complete elementary school math puzzles. And not just once, but multiple times in various areas throughout its open āGreat Desertā map. Real fracking immersive, right? – Claire Jackson Read More
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Image: Bethesda Softworks
If youāre anything like me, you went looking for a Fallout game to play the second you were done with watching the well-received Amazon show. Despite the fact that the ending tees up a second season that will assuredly expound on New Vegas, a settlement from a similarly titled and beloved game, I zagged a bit and wound up playing Fallout 76, a survival-MMO based on the first-person RPGs. While functionally and aesthetically similar to Fallout 3 and other, more recent games in the series, Fallout 76 is more than just a multiplayer Fallout game: to me, thereās no better modern entry that picks up on some of the same threads as the show, and I think itās worth digging into. – Moises Taveras Read More
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