Polygon

Bungie re-revealed its extraction shooter Marathon in a livestream out of its studio in Bellevue, Wash, Saturday. Marathon was officially revealed in May of 2023, and Bungie has been relatively quiet since its announcement. But as the studio gears up for the game’s Sept. 23 release date, it’s opening the floodgates on all things Marathon.

The studio started the event with a quick intro and a flashy trailer, followed by some of its developers discussing the game in more detail. This led into a significantly longer trailer (narrated by Ben Starr of Final Fantasy 16 and Balatro fame) explaining how Marathon works.

The idea is that each player inhabits the shell of a Runner, a bio-cybernetic mercenary body. Players will then group up in teams of three to drop into a variety of maps on the colony of Tau Ceti IV.

Once they arrive, players will search around the environment to find loot and complete contracts for their factions back home. They’ll also encounter other players and be able to kill them to steal their loot. Players who are able to safely extract from Tau Ceti IV will maintain any and all gear they found while exploring and hunting. Death, however, will cause players to drop everything in their inventory — including any items they brought with them into the lobby.

After more discussion, the event ended with a short film set in the Marathon universe, created by Alberto Mielgo, the 2022 Oscar winner for best animated short film (The Windshield Wiper). Mielgo has also worked on Love, Death & Robots and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The short film showcases the life of the Runners, featuring their bodies getting shredded by enemies, intercut with something reminiscent of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner.

Marathon will come to PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series consoles — despite the fact that Bungie was purchased by Sony in early 2022. Interested players can also sign up to participate in the Marathon alpha test, coming ahead of launch.

The studio did not speak about Marathon’s price during the stream, but a representative from Bungie confirmed to Polygon that Marathon will not be free-to-play, and will have an upfront cost. It’s currently unclear what that cost will be, or how the studio may choose to monetize the game post-launch.

Disclosure: This article is based on aMarathonpreview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can findadditional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Marathon, Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, has been officially rerevealed via a Saturday stream out of the developer’s main offices in Bellevue, Washington.

As part of a preview event for press and creators, Bungie flew me out to Washington to spend about six hours with the game, see the reveal event early, and speak to some of the creatives who are working to put everything together ahead of the game’s Sept. 23 release date.

I spent about 20 minutes speaking to Joe Ziegler, Marathon’s game director, and Andrew Witts, the gameplay director. We talked about how they define a Bungie game, who the studio is targeting with such an ambitious PvP title, and what they learned from Destiny 2’s successes and failures in the live service space.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.]

Polygon: Bungie is best known for taking popular PC-only genres and bringing them to the console masses. With Marathon, you’re trying to introduce people to this janky, weird, beloved extraction shooter genre by injecting the talent from a massive studio and a ton of money. With this being the newest genre you all have ever tried to bring to new players, what are the challenges that come with that leap to console and a whole new pool of customers? It sounds like an exciting uphill battle to develop.

Joe Ziegler: Yeah, I mean, definitely. There is somebody who I used to work with at another company who said, “Impossible is my favorite kind of possible,” and really it’s not about being impossible, but it’s about — I think doing hard things is sort of what makes the job really exciting. And when it comes to this particular challenge, I think that the way we approached it when we were really talking about it — as me and Andrew joined the project about two years ago — a big thing was really focusing on what kind of experience are we really trying to make here?

For us, it wasn’t like we’re trying to make an extraction shooter as a concept. It was like, what is the way that we can create a session-based survival experience where, if you are looking for the thrill of getting out there, trying to survive an experience that’s really, really dangerous and tough, but eking out alive and having a great story to tell about it, how do we create that kind of game? Some of the extraction conventions that we utilize were really, really useful for helping to make it happen, but typically, for us, it was just really about driving a narrow definition of what it is that we’re trying to build around more than anything else. So yeah, we’ve really focused on the sort of team-based survival experience more than anything else.

Andrew Witts: And there’s a lot of pieces to it that we heavily talked about. For a Bungie game, there’s expectation of what the action game is, right? We talked about it for a bit. It’s a big part of the DNA. And then you have a survival action game or FPS action game and what does that mean? What is the Bungie version of that? […] And for this game, when we talk about the survival part of it, there’s two parts that usually get people to lean forward and feel that. The first one is: How does the gameplay experience provide tension? Because people, when they’re tense, they often talk, and then it being a teamplay game, naturally people are communicating, and that’s a good thing.

The other part of it is: How do you make people “scared” a little bit? […] And then the awesome moment when you extract, and that feeling like a Bungie action-game moment.

So we had a lot of conversations of, What is the Bungie version and how does this scale and meet expectations? And I think we had a “very terrifying hill to climb,” or whatever? I think it’s an apt phrase I think that we’d probably agree with.

Ziegler: But I think some of it is also sort of figuring out, how do we extend the definition of what Bungie does, and go beyond that idea of, Oh, for 10 years we’ve been focused on big-grade experiences and things of that sort, right, to, Hey, we actually also want to do that and also see how we can create tense, sort of sandbox PvP experiences as well. And the marriage of that is just an extension of the idea of what we could accomplish.

I think it’s been interesting watching gaming become more segmented over the years. As it gets bigger, there are more pockets that people can fill into. Everyone played Halo**. Destiny is a fierce but small pocket of the internet, but is still quite successful.** Marathon is obviously pushing more in that niche-but-passionate direction, and that seems like a tough road for new players. I intentionally didn’t play an extraction shooter before seeing Marathon because I wanted to experience your onboarding into the genre. I was able to learn pretty quickly because I had Kevin Yanes [lead of the Runner team on Marathon and former Destiny developer] for the second half of the day as one of my squadmates. But for people who don’t have the benefit of Kevin—

Ziegler: [To Witts] Maybe we should ship with Kevin?

Witts: We had that conversation. [laughs]

A Kevin in every box would be very helpful! But how do you think about introducing something that is going to be quite unfamiliar for a lot of people who aren’t the Tarkov sickos? What is the process of bringing the Bungie audience into Marathon while also attracting a new group of players?

Ziegler: I think it just really depends on how we sort of even cut up the Bungie audience when we think about it, right? Because, in a lot of ways, we’re looking to — when we think about the experience we’re creating, it’s a very PvE- and PvP-focused game. And the difficulty is, in some games, those things are opt-in or opt-out. In our game, you can’t opt out of the PvP experience. And so if you are a player who enjoys Bungie games but doesn’t enjoy PvP, it is probably not a game for you, to be fair. But if you are a Bungie player who also enjoys PvP games, especially sandbox survival games or even sandbox PvP games, you’ll probably really enjoy this game. You’ll find a good way in.

And some of it is also just understanding that we’re not looking to take Marathon and just say, “This is now Destiny 3” and then shift that over. We really are looking to the future of Destiny 2 and trying to figure out and work with players on how that’s going to evolve and change. And so we’re kind of carving something to live besides it for another set of players which is really focused on PvP, really focused on PvP sandbox survival experiences.

So are you mostly looking for the PvP lords here? Or where do you see them overlap with something like the Destiny audience? I’ll say, personally, that I don’t spend much time in the Crucible [Destiny PvP] these days. But, back when they were offering awesome PvE rewards via the Crucible — Mountaintop, Recluse, etc. — I put the time in to get good. I’m finding Marathon is scratching that itch, and the loot aspect is making me want to engage with PvP, and want to improve my skills. And when I look at the metagame, with the contracts and secrets, there’s a lot here for someone like me who tends to avoid a lot of the big PvP games that come out every year.

But, without having just played it for hours, I’m not sure I would’ve expected that Marathon would activate that part of my brain again. How do you all think about reaching players that may very well love Marathon**, but are scared by how intense and sweaty it seems on its face?**

Ziegler: Yeah, no, and to be fair, I don’t know if our game is only for the sweats. I actually totally agree with you on that front. I think when we think about PvP versus PvE, it’s more about saying that, if you are completely against ever having a PvP interaction, it’s probably not your game. If you’re OK with PvP, but you also enjoy other elements of it, we’re really driving that as well. And I think that some of it is, we do have that contract system that exists inside the game. […] I think for those players, we are focusing a little bit more on: How do we just generate the right kind of new user experience? We have the [solo tutorial] in the front that you might’ve experienced today. That actually sort of helps you learn some of the basics, but we also have the new user contracts that we’re continuing to iterate on that actually help you kind of stepladder into understanding how to accomplish goals inside of the game. […] We want to be approachable to those types of players who are sitting on the fence as well.

Witts: Bungie’s really good about delivering on fantasies and multiple aspects from the gameplay side of things. Exploration, all that stuff is still a part of this game. It’s just that it’s a very brutal environment where you have to be on your toes and you have to play tactically, and it’s a very tense experience where everything in there is hostile to you, and so you have to play it to be on your toes. But those pieces are there for those peaks that you’re talking about.

Ziegler: I think one of the things that we’ve noticed that’s been a really good trigger for learning for a lot of players is I think a lot of people who approach an extraction shooter assume that your goal is to take every fight that you see, having to try to survive. But the reality is part of the survival game is actually knowing which fights you want to take or avoiding the fights you don’t want to take or trying to get away from threats that exist in the world. Sometimes you are the college student running from the serial killer, sometimes you are the hunter.

Seasonal resets have been controversial in other extraction shooter games, although I can certainly see the argument in their favor. After years of running a live service series with Destiny and Destiny 2**, what has Bungie learned in terms of managing the live content model? When you delete everyone’s cool stuff at the end of the season, what have you learned that will help you excite those players enough to come back for the next season?**

Ziegler: Obviously there’s two different games when you think about Destiny and Marathon, right?

Absolutely.

Ziegler: And Destiny really is about this idea that I’m always growing more and more powerful by a number moving forward, getting better gear, getting better weaponry and things of that sort. And that’s the appeal of that experience, is just to keep driving that way. Whereas I think for us, what we’re aspiring for Marathon to really achieve is to have a sort of continuous survival engine that changes its form all the time. So, season to season, it should be not just experiencing the exact same thing a new time, but experiencing a different way to level, for example, a different way to experience new content in that journey as you go along.

For us, it is leaning into what it means to be a sort of seasonal reset game and making each season feel like its own experience so that we can drive forward in that way. Having said that, though, we want to make sure you’re commemorating those seasons. So we want to make sure that you earn things that you can keep at an account level that might be more cosmetic-oriented, or title-oriented, that let you carry those into new seasons and be like, I was there. I accomplished this thing. And so it’s more about creating those resets.

[Disclosure: This article is based on aMarathonpreview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2-4. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can findadditional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.]

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

The Marathon alpha gives you a chance to play Bungie’s forthcoming extraction shooter significantly ahead of its Sept. 23 release date.

Announced during Bungie’s Marathon stream on April 12, the Marathon alpha allows you to check out four characters on two maps. Like most alpha tests, though, it also doubles as a technical stress test for the game, meaning you could run into connectivity issues and other hiccups.

Below, we’ll tell you how to sign up for the Marathon alpha, including some other information about what to expect from the alpha.

How to sign up for the Marathon alpha

Currently, the only way to get into the Marathon alpha test is to join Bungie’s Marathon Discord, which you can access via the following link: https://discord.gg/marathonthegame.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown on how to sign up for the Marathon alpha:

Sign up for the Marathon Discord and agree to the rules.Go to the #alpha_access chat and type /alpha.Watch for the Discord bot to ping you in the #new-noise chat and follow the custom link it offers.Create a Bungie account if you don’t have one, or sign into an existing account.Select your platform of choice: PlayStation, Steam, or Xbox.Thoroughly read and, if you’re comfortable, accept the Marathon alpha NDA.Fill out the Marathon survey, which asks you about your preferred platforms (including PC specs, if that’s your choice), your experience with past Bungie games, and your familiarity with PvP games like Marathon.Close out of the survey and return to the original tab to confirm that you’ve been signed up for the alpha.

In a post-script on the survey, Bungie notes completing the form enters you into “a pool” of prospective players but does not guarantee access to the alpha. Codes will be sent to players the week of April 14, and throughout the runtime of the alpha.

It’s possible Bungie could add more methods to get Marathon alpha access in the future, but the studio hasn’t announced anything like that just yet.

When does the Marathon alpha start and end?

The alpha will start on Wednesday, April 23, at 10 a.m. PDT and run through Sunday, May 4, at 10 a.m. PDT.

Bungie said in a FAQ on its website that this particular alpha is focused on North America and only available to players ages 18 or older. Codes are locked to your particular Bungie account and thus can’t be given away or sold. Access will also not come with friend codes, although players will be able to group up with others who’ve been selected.

If you are selected for the Marathon alpha, you’ll get an email with instructions on how to download the game, which is about 6 GB. Curious about the PC specs? See them here!

Bungie also confirmed that there will be additional opportunities to play Marathon ahead of its Sept. 23 release date. All account progress will be wiped between the alpha test and any the game’s launch.

What to expect from the Marathon alpha

We were able to play the Marathon alpha early as part of a media and creator preview event at Bungie HQ, though some aspects might be different than the public alpha.

During our playtime, we were able to check out two different maps: Perimeter and Dire Marsh. Perimeter is a smaller, early game map, where Dire Marsh pits six squads of three against each other in a large campus.

There were a wide variety of different weapons and items in our tests, including golden legendary items with powerful unique effects — although they were quite rare. It’s unclear if Bungie is holding back some weapon types for the full game, but the studio did confirm in a Q&A that there are unique weapon mods we weren’t able to play with.

We had access to four Runners — what Marathon calls its heroes — in the alpha:

Locus: A tank-like character with a powerful shield, a rocket salvo, and boosters on his legs.Glitch: A speed character who can quickly traverse the area with her arm cannon and double jump.Blackbird: An information character who can scan the environment to help locate potential threats.Void: A stealth character capable of going invisible at will to escape or surprise his enemies.

We were also able to test a few contracts, which are essentially quests that help improve your relationships with various factions. Advancing your faction progress will allow you to upgrade your account with more vault space, access to more advanced items in the shop, and more.

Disclosure: Parts of this article are based on aMarathonpreview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2-4. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can findadditional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

There are more Doctor Who companions than there have ever been Doctors, and while they’re all unique in their own ways, there’s still a familiar pattern: The Doctor as the mysterious alien with the keys to all of time and space, and the companion as the eager adventurer, ready to be whisked away to a life of glorious discovery and thrilling peril.

But this weekend’s premiere episode of the show’s newest season gives the usual formula a deliberate flip. To showrunner Russell T. Davies, it’s all about expanding the emotional range of Doctor Who. And for the actors playing the Doctor and his new companion Belinda Chandra, it was about partnership on screen and off.

[Ed. Note: This piece contains mild spoilers for the first episode of Doctor Who season 2 on Disney Plus, also known as Doctor Who series 15.]

In “The Robot Revolution,” Belinda is kidnapped by robots, wrapped up in an alien revolution, and between her own smarts and the Doctor’s, saves the day — and makes her position on it all very clear at the end of the episode. She’d like the Doctor to take her home. Now, please. She is not about this very dangerous life, and she has responsibilities at home.

That’s a surprising enough swerve on the usual Doctor/companion dynamic that we decided to ask Doctor Who’s stars and showrunner about it. Speaking Polygon via video chat, Davies said that the idea behind Belinda was absolutely to present a different kind of companion.

“I think Belinda simply has an awful lot of common sense,” he said. “That’s why she’s older than Ruby. I wanted to extend the range of the show; in extending the range of the show, you extend the range of the Doctor as well, which is always crucial.” Davies raised the example of last season’s companion character (who will return for season 2 in a smaller role), Ruby Sunday, a 18-year-old foster child played by then-18-year-old actress Millie Gibson, who was very much on board with the adventure of it all.

“It’s great to swing the program around and say, ‘What if you’re not so enchanted? What if you’re Belinda?’ Belinda is right in looking at this man and sort of saying, You live a mad life, and a dangerous life.” Davies cited several of the dangers Belinda and the Doctor faced in “The Robot Revolution” and will face soon in the new season.

“I think Belinda’s right,” he said, to want to go home right away. “And I think the more you acknowledge that, the more you open the emotional range of the show, and then the more people can join in. There must be people at home sitting, going, ‘That man’s mad! I wouldn’t join up with him!’ I’d like to think I’d be Ruby Sunday. I suspect I’d actually be Belinda Chandra Going ‘Get me home right now!’”

In a separate video interview, Belinda’s actress, Varada Sethu, told Polygon that she found Belinda and the Doctor’s dynamic to be “really, really interesting,” because “it puts this friction that enriched the evolution of [their] whole relationship. There was this equal push element, back to the Doctor. The Doctor saying, ‘No, come on this adventure.’ She’s like, ‘No, I have my adventure. I want to go back to mine, not yours.’ The whole season is their relationship, basically, and the love and the trust and the deep friendship that they have, in learning to love and respect each other and wanting to get her home because that’s what she wants. It lends itself really easily to a good story and a good team when there’s just as much… What am I trying to say?”

“Power, I feel,” the Doctor actor Ncuti Gatwa supplied, with Sethu agreeing: “They’re real equals.”

Sethu said that she and Gatwa discovered that dynamic in last season’s episode, “Boom,” in which she guest starred as the futuristic Anglican Marine soldier Mundy Flynn.

“Even just in the three weeks that we were filming on ‘Boom,’” Sethu told Polygon, “I felt like we found our rhythm. Because Mundy and the Doctor have a similar kind of… antagonist…”

“Trajectory,” Gatwa suggested.

“Push pull kind of thing,” she agreed. “We found that rhythm. We had had that already.”

Gatwa said that the Doctor and Belinda’s equal narrative footing in the season was very reflective of he and Sethu’s working relationship and vice versa. “Everything bleeds into one another,” he said. “What happens on set bleeds into life, in life bleeds into the set. And so it just felt like we were partners throughout the whole thing, which was very cool.”

Doctor Who series 15 is currently airing on BBC One and, as season 2, on Disney Plus.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

When I went to Bellevue, Washington, in early April to visit Bungie’s headquarters and take a gander at Marathon, the studio’s upcoming extraction shooter, I remembered the first time I played a PC copy of Halo as a teen. Despite logging hundreds of hours on Xbox before, I was terrible with my mouse and keyboard until a patient stranger spent hours guiding me to victory. I had another guide with Marathon, but it wasn’t a random username hundreds or thousands of miles away via the internet — it was Kevin Yanes, a former Destiny developer who is now the Runner gameplay lead for Marathon.

And it was in my victory alongside Yanes — and our eventual defeat — that I started to believe that with Marathon, Bungie might actually pull off the three-peat by bringing yet another genre to the masses.

The way Marathon works will be familiar to you if you’re already an extraction shooter sicko and have played games like Escape From Tarkov. But even if that’s not you, the game will still be mostly familiar if you’ve played a battle royale game like Fortnite or Apex Legends. What sets games like Tarkov and now Marathon apart from the battle royale genre — which involve a large group of players getting dropped onto a map where they loot items and try to be the last to survive — is that the loot can leave the match with you. The goal of Marathon isn’t to be the last player in the lobby; it’s to find cool shit (either hidden in a chest or stolen from other players), and then extract safely with said cool shit in tow.

Each game of Marathon begins with you selecting the Runner you’d like to play. These Runners are essentially heroes — each one has a distinct look, a couple of specific abilities, and a fistful of passive effects. You’ll then set your loadout by pulling items from past runs into your inventory, like increased shields, higher-rarity weapons, and perk nodes. Or, if you’re just starting out and don’t have any items or currency yet, you can launch in with a sponsored pack, which is a free or cheap (in terms of credits, the in-game currency) loadout that comes with low-quality versions of everything you need.

When you’re ready, you’ll group up (or matchmake) with two other players and head into the map of your choosing — of which there are several, each with varying difficulty levels and player caps. While Bungie did tell us that you can turn off squad-fill matchmaking and jump into a round as a solo or duo player, you’ll be at a distinct disadvantage.

You’ll load into a map with varying numbers of opponents, with the count depending on the map size. Dire Marsh, the map we played on for most of my preview, can hold 18 players — six squads of three, including your own.

The goal is twofold. First, you want to find the best kind of loot you can on the map; you can earn loot as a reward by completing events that appear, taking on AI enemies (all of which are very dangerous and will easily kill you if you lose focus), and solving minor puzzles. Second, you’ll be trying to make progress on any contracts you have with the game’s major factions. While we didn’t get to interact with the contract and reputation metagame as much as I would have liked, it showed a lot of promise — especially for players who don’t just want to hunt other teams for sport.

When your backpack is full and contracts are complete, it’s time to find an Exfil location. When you activate your extraction beacon, it shoots up a giant “please don’t hurt me” beam into the sky that alerts all other players that someone is trying to escape with the good stuff. If you survive until the Exfil goes off, you keep your spoils, and it all goes into your vault for the next time you want to use it. If you die at any point in the match, you lose everything you had in your inventory and cannot get it back.

If that sounds harsh, it is. It’s kind of the point. And while there are some friendlier elements to Marathon when compared to Tarkov and games like it — your allies can revive you an unlimited number of times, for example — it’s the most hardcore and punishing game that Bungie has ever made. But that’s where all the tension is, and it’s what led to some truly adrenaline-pumping moments during my sessions, a reaction that genuinely surprised me.

When I first arrived at Bungie, I had assumed that Marathon wouldn’t be for me. I was a big Halo multiplayer guy in my youth, I’ve put hundreds of hours into PUBG, played plenty of Apex, and basically haven’t put down Destiny or its sequel since 2014. But as I age, I’m less inclined to engage with PvP, and for that reason, the extraction genre hasn’t ever truly gotten my attention. Although Bungie has managed to make games that speak to me for my entire life, my history with the studio wasn’t enough to outweigh my skepticism.

After the developers walked us through how Marathon works, I was escorted to the play area to get my hands on the game. The squads were premade, and I was placed in a group with another American journalist and one from a different country who struggled to communicate with us. And thus began our morning of getting destroyed. Whenever we ran into other players, it didn’t go well for us, in what admittedly felt like a true “random matchmaking” experience.

As I went to lunch for the day, I felt conflicted. On one hand, I worried that my PvP woes were well founded, and that Marathon would eventually not be very fun if I couldn’t reliably or confidently take on other squads. On the other hand, the game was slick as hell. The sleek, mechanical aesthetic is astounding, and the strong art direction has already driven up hype. As long as I was progressing my contracts and just being present in the world of Marathon, I was having fun. My concern was what would happen when those contracts turned more intense, and when not interacting with other players would no longer be an option.

Luckily, things changed after lunch, as Bungie decided to move my team around. Suddenly, we were joined by Kevin Yanes. All anyone would say about Yanes was that he was good at Marathon. That’s an understatement, I soon learned. Yanes changed the game for me and our third squadmate, not because he could carry us while we were learning — although that was certainly part of it, I won’t lie — but because he could teach us things that would have taken hours of playing on our own to discover.

When we dropped into our first match together, Yanes opened the map and pinged two nearby locations. “OK, we got a Complex spawn,” he said, denoting where on the map we were. “There are two other squads that can spawn here and here, so we need to be careful unless we want to go after them right away.” It was overwhelming — and intoxicating. What started as a team that absolutely did not want to get into scrapes became a squad that was actively hunting players down. Suddenly, mysterious gas-filled rooms that once seemed impossible to open, we now knew how to vent. An Exfil beam didn’t mean “thank god, a team is leaving” anymore; it was more like an enemy team’s dinner bell ringing to say, We found all this cool stuff for you; please come take it! And we did.

As my knowledge grew, so did my comfort level. In very short order, I found myself going from asking Yanes questions to taking my newfound knowledge and putting it into action. Still, I did worry that Marathon wouldn’t be fun without someone like Yanes as a squadmate. That the joy was in extracting with great shit every time, not in the game itself. But even when we lost to some extremely talented Valorant players on the final match of day 2, I found that I still felt good about my experience and my team.

It’s too bad that not every player out there will have Yanes to teach them the game — as much as his co-workers joked that they should ship him with every copy of Marathon. But they will have me. And their favorite streamers. And guides (on Polygon). And Tarkov friends. And Halo players. And Guardians from Destiny’s Crucible.

Since Halo, Bungie has relied not only on its skilled developers, but on its community of players around the world to help with tutorializing its games. For my friends, I will be Yanes when it comes to Marathon — I will be the online stranger I met when I played Halo for the first time back in the day.

Marathon is difficult. It’s punishing, and it’s intentionally frustrating. It has low lows and high highs, by design. It’s a difficult sell to the masses — the most difficult pitch Bungie has made yet. But what Bungie has always been good at is producing converts: players who see the vision, get pulled inside, and can’t wait to share the game with their friends. I find myself an unlikely convert to Marathon’s vision, and I left Bellevue desperate to get my hands on the game again — one of the best feelings you can have about something you’re playing when on the clock.

There are a million factors that could sink Marathon: the crowded live service market, the game’s monetization strategy — all that Bungie has confirmed is that it won’t be free-to-play — its release timing, and the state of the global economy. You’d have to be a fool to look at any upcoming game in 2025 and say, “That’s a surefire hit.” But what I can say, without being a fool, is that Marathon made me truly enjoy PvP for the first time in nearly a decade.

Others have been teaching me to play Bungie games for 20 years, and even if I won’t be as good a teacher as Kevin Yanes, I’m excited to pay it forward with my own friends when Marathon comes to PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Sept. 23.

Disclosure: This article is based on aMarathonpreview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2-4. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can findadditional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

At nearly 600 pages, including the game’s complete screenplay — and more than a dozen bonus trinkets in the Deluxe Edition — Lost in Cult’s upcoming Immortality: Design Works isn’t the sort of book you fit neatly into your collection; it’s the sort of book you build a collection around.

The fifth entry in the U.K. publisher’s Design Works series, the Immortality book dives deep into one of Polygon’s favorite games of 2022, the FMV game that answers the question, “What happened to Marissa Marcel?” Mixing artwork with archival photos, interviews, and analysis, Immortality: Design Works will be shipping soon, so we reached out to get a bit more detail on what to expect.

As part of an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. Check out the full list to read up on an Untitled Goose Game book, a Housemarque documentary, and others. Below, Immortality: Design Works book author Chris Schilling discusses the game, thermo-reactive ink, and Lost in Cult’s highest page count to date.

Polygon: The book looks like it includes a bit of everything. What percentage is the game’s script and what percentage is writing about the game, artwork, etc.?

Chris Schilling: It’s hard to break down into percentages; suffice it to say that the complete Immortality screenplay alone runs to more than 400 pages. The rest comprises a detailed oral history, interspersed with features covering individual aspects of production — from how Half-Mermaid and crew achieved a period-perfect look for three fictional films to the game’s haunting sound design. In total, it’s close to 600 pages, making it Lost In Cult’s biggest individual book to date.

The store listing mentions “thermo-reactive ink that responds to the heat of your hands.” Can you explain how that works and what’s hidden in there?

That would be telling! We’d like readers to discover it for themselves, but the description basically says it all — if you place your hands on certain pages, you’ll reveal what’s hidden beneath the surface. It works if you hold a flame nearby, too, though we wouldn’t advise that!

What’s an obscure detail most people wouldn’t know that you learned about the game while working on the book?

Because of the game’s intricate nature, and how the scenes are interconnected, all the actors had to stick very closely to the script. But there was one moment where an accident forced a particular actor to ad-lib a line, which was so good it was kept in. It’s a really funny anecdote, so readers should look out for that one. Also, one of the production team [members] made an unexpected cameo in the game that no one knows about; again, I’ll preserve the surprise for the book. The last thing I’ll add is that you’ll learn at least as much about the filmmaking process as the game part — just about everyone I spoke to offered illuminating insights into their roles, but chatting with the game’s BAFTA-nominated costume designer Kerry Hennessy was a particular treat: that has to be one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done.

At a glance, it looks like the Deluxe Edition has about 15 items in the box. Anything you wanted to include that you weren’t able to?

At Lost In Cult we’re always keen to push the boat out and give our readers as much bang for their buck as possible. As a writer, I invariably feel like I could have done more — but extending the page count further could have made an already massive book quite unwieldy! I think the Deluxe Edition makes for a pretty comprehensive package — especially the in-fiction extras which provide some telling extra details. In particular, Manon Gage’s in-character script annotations as Marissa Marcel will be catnip for Immortality fans; discussing those with her was one of my personal highlights of the project.

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You’ll come across a pair of pictures (or paintings, or drawings, or whatever you want to call them) in every Blue Prince room. This pair of pictures (or paintings or drawings) serves as the basis for one of the most baffling puzzles in the game.

Our Blue Prince guide will tell why there are two pictures in every room and tell you everything you need to know about how to solve the picture puzzle, including examples, the solution, the reward.

Why are there two pictures in each room in Blue Prince?

Before we outright spell out the solution to Blue Prince’s wild picture puzzle, we’ll point you in the direction of where you can find some hints. There are a few rooms you can draft that will give you some clues:

CommissaryStudyClassroom 5

In the Commissary, check the bulletin board. You’ll see one picture labeled WITH and one labeled WITHOUT. This is the biggest clue about the process of solving this puzzle. It implies you need to, for lack of a better word, “subtract” one picture from the other.

In the Study, things are clarified even further. You’ll find a note asking for artwork and another with some unused examples. On the chalkboard, you’ll find a big hint about how to put it all together: a grid system that maps directly to a blank Mt. Holly blueprint, with the letter F in the spot the Entrance Hall always goes. Some small chicken scratch reads, “Face & Ace.”

If you manage to draft Classroom 5, you’ll find examples of pictures on the boards around the room. But the only two hints you really need are those from the Commissary’s bulletin board and the Study’s chalkboard.

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the Blue Prince picture puzzle below.]

How to solve picture puzzles in Blue Prince

In most rooms, you’ll find two pictures. Generally speaking, these will be arranged with one on the left and one on the right. Your job is to find two words — one for the drawing on the left and one for the right — that differ by only one letter, and then remove the shared letters.

Let’s go through an example.

In the Entrance Hall, you’ll see a pair of pictures framing the door on the right. Both are of hands holding playing cards. On the left is a queen, and there’s an ace on the right. But a queen is also a FACE card. So, FACE without ACE is just F.

Let’s do some more.

Some pictures are used multiple times, though, and have different meanings.

The TAG — the price tag with a ten on it — can mean TAG, TEN, or COST.The drawing of a PLANE can mean PLANE or FLIER.The drawing of a hand painting a moon(?) can mean PLANET or CREATE (because the hand is creating a drawing).The drawing of a tree can be a PINE or a FIR.The chart can mean CHART or RATE (because the arrow shows the rate of increase on the chart).

Other drawings only ever mean one thing, like the PRY bar, the TIGER or the TIERed serving dish.

Your task in each room is to look at the two pictures, and subtract the second from the first. The pictures change each day (more on this in a second), so if you get stuck, you can always try again another day.

For what it’s worth, not every room has pictures. According to our testing, green rooms like the Veranda or the Patio appear to never have pictures. Some hallways don’t have them. The Foundation doesn’t either. This is only a problem for one day at a time, though, as you’ll solve the pictures puzzle across multiple days.

Full Study chalkboard pictures puzzle solution in Blue Prince

Refer back to the grid that was on the chalkboard in the study. (You’re going to want a journal for this.) As you figure out which letters go in which boxes, you’ll slowly fill out a complete phrase.

The house in Blue Prince is arranged in a five-by-eight grid. Each day, the rooms will move around based on how you draft them, and when they do, the pictures will change. That’s because the letters are always in the same position. (This is also why the pictures in the Entrance Hall never change.) That means, no matter what room you put there, the bottom left corner will always be S.

With a bit of work and some patience, you can fill in a grid with each letter you find there. When you’re done, you’ll be able to read the message.

See below for the full solution:

The message is: IF WE COUNT SMALL GATES EIGHT DATES CRACK EIGHT SAFES.

So now what?

Picture puzzle reward in Blue Prince

Basically, this phrase is a hint that anything with code or combination on it is looking for a date. This includes the Orchard gate — “if we count small gates.” The safes it mentions can be found in rooms like the Shelter (the time lock safe counts as a date), Office, Study, Boudoir, and more.

These safes reveal red letters, which in turn fill out the backstory for Blue Prince. Want to track them all down? See our guide on all safe codes.

For more Blue Prince guides, here’s our full walkthrough on how to reach Room 46, plus how to unlock another permanent room with the Orchard, open the West Gate through the Garage, or how to solve the dart puzzle in the Billiards Room.

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We’re currently experiencing a golden age of video games set in the far, grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000. There are the potent power fantasies of Space Marine 2 or Boltgun, the constant hordes and frenetic combat of Darktide, the deep role-playing potential of Rogue Trader, or the tactical combat of Mechanicus or Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters. Or, you could ignore all of these options and go to one of the most unexpected hubs for fan-made 40K games: Roblox.

@goblinrurik

No Horus Heresy we are the 40k #warhammer40k #roblox #spacemarine2 #gaming #foryo #warhammercommunity#meme #robloxgames #horusheresy #spacemarines

♬ original sound – Brennan

Roblox is a free-to-play sandbox that hosts a ton of popular games, including Dress to Impress, Blox Fruit, and Squid Game remakes. Roblox allows users to make their own games and worlds, including ones inspired by the 40K universe. It’s an absolutely fascinating mash-up that most fans wouldn’t expect on account of some glaring contradictions.

One of the most notable parts of 40K is that it’s so big — there are legions of genetically modified, heavily armored Space Marines, ancient and terrible alien empires, and the extraplanar and deeply malicious forces of Chaos. You might think it’s impossible to take a setting of this scope and scale it down for the friendly, blocky world of Roblox. To this I say: You fool. You credulous buffoon.

These developers are ambitious, and I was stunned when I took a spin through one project in development called Humanity’s Crusade, a fan game with a massive battle barge crewed by Space Marines, a battlefront against the Tyranids, and more. There’s also Marches of Molech, which is set during the Horus Heresy era; Wargamer took a look at the project last year. Here, we see a dedicated march of Ultramarines, with each Space Marine controlled by a player.

Another game, called Caledga Prime, has the following lore-rich description.

Caldega Prime stands in the Segmentum Ultima, a crucial Frontier World for the Imperium. Calamity struck when the Traitor Legions unleashed Chaos, sowing death and terror wherever they tread… Yet the Imperium refuses to give up its vital resources, holding its ground.

Regiments of the Astra Militarum (Imperial Guard) – including Cadian and veterans of the Death Korps – battle ceaselessly, often backed by the Adeptus Mechanicus’ diligent Legiones Skitarii. Meanwhile, Space Marine Chapters deploy elite Astartes in swift strikes against the renegades, echoing Cadia’s doomed heroism in the Emperor’s name.

Some fans have even gone so far as to try to recreate famous battles from the 40K history books, like the Siege of Vraks. In the lore, Vraks was a massive back-and-forth that lasted nearly two decades, with neither side willing to either back down or commit Exterminatus and destroy the whole dang planet. This Roblox game is set during the Siege, and pays close attention to the armed forces on the ground during this protracted battle.

Roblox may be known as a kids’ game, but Warhammer 40K is decidedly not. This is a setting where machines are run by the brains of lobotomized criminals, civilians are regularly marched into volcanoes, and all manner of war crimes are happening basically all the time.

Despite this, it seems that fans have found a way to build tributes to the setting with a widely accessible set of tools. While we have a wealth of great, officially licensed titles to enjoy, we also have Warhammer at home. There’s something fun and charming about seeing people embrace the spirit of 40K and making their own games in the setting, telling their own stories or expanding on the galaxy’s most famous battles.

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It’s hard to imagine the beloved blockbuster disappointment A Goofy Moviewithout the distinct voice Disney fans have associated with him since Pinto Colvig originated the character in 1932. But according to Disney Plus’ Not Just a Goof, a documentary that dives into the making of the 1995 cult classic for its 30th anniversary, there was a moment where it looked like Goofy wouldn’t be able to keep his iconic *Hyuck!*s and Gawrsh!s for the movie.

According to A Goofy Movie director Kevin Lima, Walt Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg wasn’t totally sold on the cartoony Goofy voice. So he offered an alternative.

“He had this… great idea,” Lima recounts, dripping sarcasm. “What if… Steve Martin were Goofy? Wouldn’t that be fabulous? Imagine how you could sell that!”

Katzenberg didn’t even want Martin to attempt the classic Goofy voice, Lima says — he just wanted Martin to do his own voice.

Lima and the other filmmakers knew this was, quite frankly, a terrible idea. But in order to gently guide Katzenberg to that conclusion, Lima approached longtime Goofy voice actor Bill Farmer and Jason Marsden (who voiced Goofy’s son Max) and suggested a plan. Lima asked Farmer to just record some scenes in his regular voice.

“And Bill has a complete meltdown,” Lima says.

“I went home and I didn’t get much sleep,” Farmer confesses in the movie. “’Cause I was worried… Don’t they wanna hear Goofy when they hear A Goofy Movie?”

Still, Farmer went through with it, recording a few scenes in his normal voice. The team showed the footage to Katzenberg, with Lima claiming that he personally wasn’t behind the idea. After watching the scenes, Katzenberg thankfully also agreed that the straightforward character voice did not work for Goofy, and Farmer was able to return to the usual Goofy characterization for the movie.

“This is how the whim of a studio executive can change a movie in a moment if you don’t fight back against a bad idea,” says Lima.

While the filmmakers didn’t ultimately use Farmer’s regular voice, though, head of story Brian Pimental says those recording sessions added dimensionality to the character. In the Goof Troop television show and other Goofy shorts, Goofy is cartoonish and silly. But A Goofy Movie shows more of his emotional range, as a sometimes struggling, sometimes angry, or loving, or emotionally wounded father. Now that the filmmakers knew what Farmer could do, Lima said, they could guide him to a subtler and more powerful performance.

Given Goofy’s decades-long role as Disney’s resident clown, it might have seemed strange on paper to see Goofy having a tense heart-to-heart with Max, where he and his son awkwardly stumble over words. Especially after a scene where Goofy accidentally catches Bigfoot, screams his head off, and scrambles away backward while holding up his camera to record the cryptid. But that contrast is what makes A Goofy Movie so special. All respect to Steve Martin, but without Bill Farmer and the classic Goofy characterization, it just wouldn’t be the same.

Not Just a Goofis streaming now on Disney Plus. (And so is A Goofy Movie*).*

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In The Wheel of Time’s very first episode, trollocs attacked the quaint farming village known as the Two Rivers, calling on the might of five tethered teens and a determined Aes Sedai (Rosamund Pike) to keep their humble home from falling in the carnage. Of course, ill-prepared and overwhelmed farmers were no proper army then, and it took Rand (Josha Stradowski), Mat (Barney Harris, now played by Dónal Finn), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), Egwene (Madeleine Madden), and Nynaeve (Zoë Robins) fleeing their home for the onslaught to cease. Now, 23 episodes and four years later, the fate of the Two Rivers has been called into question once again in season 3’s bloody, battle-ridden seventh episode. But much like the Wheel’s meticulous weaving, this full-circle moment speaks to the overall success of The Wheel of Time’s ambitious, centuries-spanning story and its unique position in our modern fantasy landscape.

Because while that first battle was a devastating push to bring Wheel’s most influential teens closer to their destiny, episode 7’s brutality is triumphant, bloody proof that the kids that fled that day have since changed this world for the better. Perrin, removed from his friends and struggling to become a leader in a town that used to feel like home, steps into his destiny in the same way Rand and Mat did in season 2’s similarly triumphant finale, finally granting him his long-awaited redemption for the lingering guilt he has shouldered. And it’s through this powerful and moving return that The Wheel of Time cements its commitment to weaving an earnest fantasy epic, free of the strings attached to nearly all of its modern counterparts.

As Perrin sits by the fire in the very inn his friends used to drink and gamble in, stands in the very forge where he swung an ax into his wife, and looks onto the faces of those he’s known and loved his whole life, the ghosts of his past lingering in every frame elevate the stakes of his return. He tells Loial (Hammed Animashaun) to carry on the memory of the Two Rivers, to ensure that others “learn from [their] stories” so that “when the Shadow comes for them, they’ll win.” It’s that commitment to carrying the torch for the past while forging a path into the future that elevates the series’ ambitious epic. With characters like Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe) white-knuckling past lives and figureheads like Siuan (Sophie Okonedo) contemplating the possibility that Rand may break the world once again, Wheel’s panoptic awareness of its sprawling fantasy weave ensures each lore dump and carefully plotted reveal is load-bearing and satisfying.

When Perrin breaks out in song during the group’s long trek to Tar Valon in the series’ first season, the tale of Manetheren and its determined people feels so distant. But as the folks of the Two Rivers begin to take up arms, knowing full well that they stand alone in protecting the home they cherish, Manetheren’s distant memory enhances their fight — the story of sacrifice and determination singing on the wind once again. The Wheel of Time places reverence in repetition, and uses the history of both the series itself and the characters within it to highlight the power and magnitude of choice and will. The Wheel may wind its pawns through its never-ending cycle, but it’s the informed choices of these central players (and the informed irony of its audience) that allows Wheel to craft a story that is as much about the past as it is about the future.

Unlike its modern fantasy peers — prequels engaging with the past in shallow, referential ways (House of the Dragon, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) or unwieldy pseudo-franchises spinning off in numerous unsuccessful directions (The Witcher) — The Wheel of Time uniquely interlays every moment of its unfolding history alongside the characters we care about in the present and the ways their futures may unravel.

So when swords begin clashing and arrows begin flying, the epic highs and heart-pounding lows of this battle don’t come from its relation to another piece of media from decades ago, an adrenaline-shot of nostalgia from a mirrored image, or a payoff for something revealed in a supplemental series unwatched by most casual viewers — the stakes come from a meaningful investment in the story being told in this show, a series committed to exploring the past, present, and future of this complex story through the Wheel’s well-revved narrative engine. While its peers vend in nostalgia bait and use Easter eggs as shorthand in place of connective narrative tissue, Prime Video’s other fantasy outing gives weight and reverence to both its past and its future. And episode 7’s bloody battle for the Two Rivers perfectly encapsulates The Wheel of Time’s careful balance between its weaving Wheel and its expansive ambitions.

The Wheel of Time spends its seventh episode referencing its past not as a reward for certain audiences’ continued investment in its parent companies’ precious IP, but as ample payoff for investing in this specific story with these specific characters, and believing in both them and the series itself enough to stick with it through its mid-COVID woes and its streaming-typical extended hiatuses. By being tethered to nothing but its (admittedly overly long) source material, The Wheel of Time fundamentally relies on these satisfying full-circle moments to elevate itself above its peers, all while doubling down on its central messaging.

Because, even in a fantasy world ruled by the undulating Wheel and the very real consequences of being caught unaware of the past, The Wheel of Time pulls no punches in drawing mirrored comparisons to our current moment. As our country is pulled further and further into the past by the current administration, The Wheel of Time’s commitment to questioning just how much a people can let history repeat itself before change is forced and forged is refreshing and eye-opening for its fantastical implications and its real-world, stomach-churning relatability.

While any other fantasy series may have drawn out the bloodshed, complete with flashy filmmaking and over-the-top action, The Wheel of Time’s comparatively quiet buildup to the all-out brawl places emotional reunions and intimate conversations above fantasy showmanship. And when the trollocs begin to invade in earnest, the episode is better for having spent the time allowing for soft ruminations on the past before questioning whether or not these characters will live to see the next dawn. More than anything, The Wheel of Time has wisely utilized every moment of its often overstuffed seasons to aid in telling one of modern TV’s most intriguing and moving fantasies, allowing its past, present, and the bright possibility of its future to guide the characters we know and love into each magnificent chapter.

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If you’ve ever considered jumping into the BattleTech tabletop game, right now, Humble is offering an $18 bundle that includes all of the rulebooks you need to start playing, in addition to several sourcebooks, campaigns, and technical manuals to supplement your experience. While you technically don’t need fancy miniatures to play BattleTech, picking up an inexpensive introductory set like the Battletech Beginner Box is a great way to start building out your mini-Lance.

The most important parts of this bundle are the Battlemech Manual, Alpha Strike: Commander’s Edition, and BattleTech: Total Warfare, which will get you up to speed on everything you need to play or run your own campaign. However, this bundle also features technical readouts for classic and modern ‘Mechs, in addition to BattleTech: A Time of War, which folds in rules for a more personal TTRPG experience on top of ‘Mech combat.

BattleTech is a massive tabletop franchise that spans roughly a millennium of human history and has even recently announced a new, Warhammer-inspired, set titled BattleTech: Gothic. This bundle, however, sticks to the classic franchise and includes everything you need to set up campaigns, from the Succession Wars stretching all the way into the Ilkhan era.

Humble Bundle sets always put aside a portion of your purchase to benefit a non-profit. This particular bundle will help fund No Kid Hungry, an organization that helps to provide children with nutrition at schools and at home. However, you can always customize how much of your purchase goes to the publisher, to Humble, or to charity by using the “adjust donation” drop-down menu and selecting a custom amount.

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For as tremendous as FromSoftware games are, none of them are particularly good at co-op. You can’t just invite your friend and join a party in Elden Ring. You need to be in the right place, with the right password, while the right stars in the universe align just to hit monsters with your friends. If it wasn’t for the seamless co-op mod by Yui, Elden Ring’s co-op would be borderline unplayable.

A few months ago, Yui went back and fixed co-op in Dark Souls 3. And now she’s fixed the most important game in FromSoftware’s history: the original Dark Souls.

The first version of the seamless co-op mod for Dark Souls Remastered was released on Thursday. With it, you can play the action RPG that kicked off a whole genre with up to six players. “Simply put, the mod allows you to play with friends throughout the entirety of the game with no restrictions,” Yui wrote in the description on Nexus Mods.

In the announcement video, you can see that it works like the Elden Ring version: You use a custom item in your inventory to summon people into your world at any time. Defeating bosses won’t disband the group like it does normally, and everyone won’t be prevented from interacting with NPCs. It just works.

“Dark Souls 1 was my first Dark Souls game and it has a special place in my heart,” Yui told Polygon over DMs. “I also believe that the interconnected world of the game makes it a truly great candidate for seamless co-op.”

Yui said it was much easier to make than the one for Elden Ring, but that there were a few issues that had to be worked out. Dark Souls came out 11 years before Elden Ring and wasn’t designed to be truly open-world, so players are gated by fog doors during regular co-op. Yui had to work around the game unloading parts of the map when people get too far away from the host, which “took a good amount of reverse engineering to get down,” she said.

Even with those roadblocks, it only took her a week to get the mod running. It’s fully functional right now, but Yui said she’ll continue to fix any reported bugs until its flawless.

Installing the mod requires unzipping some files into the right place and choosing a unique password for everyone to use. Then you’re free to roam around Lordran with your posse of Chosen Undead. And don’t worry about getting banned. The mod doesn’t touch FromSoftware’s servers and uses separate save files. Your co-op crew is safe.

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Larian Studios is finally ready to say goodbye to Baldur’s Gate 3 with one last update set to go live next Tuesday, April 15.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patch 8, as the expansion is called, focuses on three major updates: an additional sub-class for every main class, cross-play between all platforms, and a photo mode. The developer conducted a handful of community stress tests over the last few weeks, and, ignoring that time the entire update accidentally went live on PlayStation 5, it sounds like Patch 8 is finally ready for public consumption.

The studio plans to celebrate Patch 8’s release with a special livestream hosted by Larian senior communications developer Aoife Wilson and featuring Baldur’s Gate 3 senior systems designer Ross Stephens, who will provide a detailed look at everything the update has to offer.

As Larian Studios won’t be following the 2023 Game of the Year up with Baldur’s Gate 4 — never fear, Hasbro’s already looking for a successor — Patch 8 marks the end of an era for the studio that began all the way back in 2020 when Baldur’s Gate 3 first entered early access.

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Trying to find the best games on PC isn’t easy. Hundreds of them show up every day on places like Steam and Itch.io. It’s hard to keep up. But don’t worry — we’ve got you. This list has the 20 best games on PC you can play right now.

PC games has become even more ubiquitous in the last decade. Not only do console games make their way over more frequently now, surprise hits like Among Us and Lethal Company feel like they can show up at any moment. That’s the beauty of playing games on a such an open platform: It’s always thriving.

You don’t even have to worry about backward compatibility for old games. A lot of them still work, or have been updated by fans. If you never want to leave the frigid mountains of Skyrim, you don’t have to! Plenty of classic games still have a heartbeat and have grown up over the last few decades. Where else can you jump into a 20-year-old MMO like World of Warcraft?

The games below are of a variety of genres and art styles. They can be played for a handful of hours or hundreds of hours, on keyboard and mouse or controller. Handheld PC players should check out our list of the best games on Steam Deck, but several of our picks are certified to run on those too.

Our latest update added Elden Ring.

How we pick the best games on PC

The Polygon staff plays a lot of video games, and everything in this list comes personally recommended by at least one of us. We determined what should be on our list of the best PC games by looking at the quality of each title, but also with an eye for breadth and variety — so you should find something on the list you’ll enjoy, no matter what genres of game you like, how much time you have, or what vibe you are after.

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Safes can be found around the estate in Blue Prince, either out in the open or hidden to the eye, but you’ll need a safe code to open each one.

Each safe code can be found by using information from its respective room and around the estate, but coming up with the safe code is a puzzle in itself. Additionally, without a few critical hints, these codes are impossible to figure out. Once you open a safe, though, you’ll find one of the red letters, which will add some important lore to the Blue Prince story.

In this Blue Prince guide, we’ve detailed where to find all of the safes we’ve found so far, along with their safe codes and the thought process behind them.

[Ed. note: This guide contains spoilers for Blue Prince. If you only want to see the code to a specific safe, use the table of contents below to navigate to it.]

All Safe Codes in Blue Prince

Prior to giving you the safe locations along with their codes, you should know that you’ll receive a hint for each safe’s solution after completing the puzzle found in the Study Room. If you’d like to attempt to solve each safe code, make sure to finish that puzzle first!

We’ve found seven safes, each one containing a red letter, so far and we’re missing just one, which Blue Prince players broadly assume is located in a hidden safe somewhere around the estate. As of this writing, to the best of our knowledge, no players have found that safe (if it even exists). Check back later!

The seven safes can be found in the Shelter, Boudoir, Study, Office, Drafting Studio, Drawing Room, and behind a Red Door.

SafeCodeRewardShelterTime and dateRed letter #7 and a gemBoudoir1225Red letter #4 and a gemStudy0812Red letter #2 and a gemOffice0303Red letter #8 and a gemDrafting Studio1108Red letter #5Drawing Room0415Red letter #6 and a gemBehind the Red DoorMAY8Red letter #1, a gem, and the Treasure Trove blueprint

How to open the Shelter Time-Lock Safe

The Shelter’s time-lock safe functions a little differently than the other safes in Blue Prince. To open this safe, you’ll need to know the time and date. The first day you arrived to the estate is November 7, so you can add your total number of days minus one to November 7 to get today’s date.

On a day you’ve drafted the Shelter as your Outer Room, input today’s date and a time that is at least one hour ahead. Once the clock hits your assigned time, you’ll have four hours to return and see what’s inside the safe.

Boudoir safe code

The Boudoir safe, found in the corner of the room, is out in the open and taunting you. However, with the knowledge that codes are related to dates, you can use the Christmas photo on the vanity to solve the code.

Interact with the safe and input 1-2-2-5 to open the safe.

Study safe code

The Study safe is also out in the open, just sitting and belittling you for not being able to find out its secret code. With the knowledge that the safe code is a date, but also that there are no dates of any kind inside the room, it’s a tough one. Instead, look at the chess board on the table to find a black King piece sitting on D8.

This can be interpreted phonetically as “date” — or December 8. Input 0-8-1-2 into the safe to open it and claim its rewards.

Office safe code

The Office safe will only reveal itself after you’ve turned the dial inside the desk drawer, which also includes a paper featuring book titles such as “Count on March.”

In this room, you can find numerous statues of people related to the estate, but one of the heads is more important than the others — Count Isaac Gates. If you’ve never been to the Foyer, you might’ve never known what Count Isaac Gates’ bust looked like, but you can find three small Gates around the room.

Adding the three small Gates with the book title “Count on March,” and you’ll get the safe code: 0-3-0-3.

Drafting Studio safe code

Inside the Drafting Studio, you’ll find a perfect but miniature replica of a safe on one of the dioramas on a desk. Interacting with the safe will tell you its a perfect replica, but if you interact with the safe while you have a magnifying glass, you’ll see that it can be opened.

Next, with your magnifying glass, interact with the November calendar on the wall to find eight small gates around the Apple Orchard. If you combine the eight gates with the month of November, you’ll get 1-1-0-8.

Drawing Room safe code

The Drawing Room safe is not visible until you take a closer look at the drawing in the center of the room. In this drawing, you’ll notice that one of the candleabra’s arms on the fireplace is misaligned. Interact with the candleabra to reveal the safe behind one of the drawings inside the room.

For this safe code, you’ll have to look at each drawing’s small gait, which is how a person moves. There are two drawings with small gaits — the woman in a dress and man with an umbrella. Around the room, you can find four drawings of the woman and 15 drawings of the man, so if you combine the two, you’ll get the safe code 0-4-1-5.

Behind the Red Door lock code

For those who’ve reached the Inner Sanctum, you might’ve noticed a locked red door on the way. Behind the red door, you’ll find a locked gate that has a letter lock, but also has an “8” on the last dial. Knowing that each lock’s code is a date, the “8” is the day and the rest of the three dials need to make up the month.

The only month that fits in the first three dials, including each month’s abbreviation, is the month of May — making the lock code M-A-Y-8.

For more Blue Prince guides, see our full walkthrough on how to reach Room 46, or check out our guides on where to find all Antechamber levers, sheet music pages, and blue braziers.

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Team-Up abilities are thematically appropriate moves in Marvel Rivals, allowing two or more heroes from the Marvel Universe to pair up and kick ass as a group. These unique effects can be extremely powerful, and can even change the tide of battle if you know what you’re doing.

Season 2 added several new Team-Ups while removing a few others. NetEase Games will continue to add more Team-Ups as the roster grows.

In this Marvel Rivals guide, we’ll walk you through how Team-Ups attacks work and what all the current in-game Team-Ups do.

How do Team-Ups work in Marvel Rivals

As of Season 2, there are 18 Team-Up abilities in Marvel Rivals to go along with the game’s roster of 38 heroes. There are also two newly “unavailable” Team-Ups, which could return in another season, but are currently inaccessible.

Because each Team-Up is unique, they all work a bit differently from one another, but the general idea is that pairing up certain heroes on the same team can offer spectacular benefits (you can see who your hero can use a Team-Up with in the center of your screen during character select).

Some of these benefits are purely passive, like Hela’s Ragnarok Rebirth ability, which allows her to resurrect Thor or Loki mid-combat if they’re on her team. Others, like Rocket Raccoon’s Ammo Overload, add an active ability for either the primary hero (the person supplying the Team-Up) to the secondary heroes (the heroes benefitting the most from the Team-Up).

Most Team-Ups are lopsided, meaning that one hero might not benefit at all from having allies in their Team-Up on the field. The other side, however, may benefit immensely by the presence of their generator ally. Lunar Force, for example, does nothing for Cloak & Dagger while Moon Knight is on their team. However, Cloak & Dagger’s presence allows Moon Knight to occasionally turn invisible, which is an extremely potent effect.

Team-Ups are not required for victory, but they can be extremely powerful, and are worth playing into whenever you get the chance. It’s a good idea to learn several different characters in your preferred role so that you can swap over to support an ally with a Team-Up.

All Team-Up abilities in Marvel Rivals

Below, you’ll find a complete chart for all 18 Team-Ups available in season 2 of Marvel Rivals:

Team-Up NamePrimary heroSecondary hero(es)Team-Up EffectRagnarok RebirthHelaLoki, ThorHela gains a passive ability that allows her, after she secures the final hit on an enemy, to instantly resurrect one of her brothers if they're dead, or give them bonus health if they're living.Planet X PalsGrootRocket Raccoon, Jeff the Land SharkRocket Raccoon and Jeff the Land Shark can interact with Groot to ride around on his shoulders, granting them bonus damage reduction.Symbiote BondVenomSpider-Man, Peni ParkerVenom grants Spider-Man and Peni Parker an active ability, which allows them to channel a symbiote through them, dealing damage to enemies and pushing them back.Gamma ChargeHulkNamor, Iron ManHulk's presence augments Iron Man's Armor Overdrive and Namor's Monstro turret, making them more powerful.Ammo OverloadRocket RaccoonThe PunisherRocket Raccoon gains a bonus ability that allows him to place an ammo device on the ground. This device grants The Punisher faster firing weapons and unlimited ammo while he's nearby.Dimensional ShortcutMagikBlack PantherMagik grants an active ability to Black Panther, which allows him to travel backward in time while also giving him bonus health.Lunar ForceCloak & DaggerMoon KnightCloak & Dagger grant Moon Knight a new active ability, which he can use to become temporarily invisible.Guardian RevivalAdam WarlockMantis, Star-LordAdam Warlock shares his cocoon revival ability with Mantis and Star-Lord, allowing them to revive mid-combat every two minutes.Chilling CharismaLuna SnowJeff the Land SharkLuna Snow grants an active ability to Jeff the Land Shark. This ability infuses Jeff's attacks with a slowing field.Allied AgentsHawkeyeBlack WidowHawkeye grants Black Widow a new active ability, which allows her to spot and damage enemy afterimages.Atlas BondIron FistLuna SnowIron Fist grants Luna Snow a bonus active ability, which causes an ice ring to explode around her when activated. This ring launches enemies up and heals nearby allies.ESU AlumnusSpider-ManSquirrel GirlSpider-Man gives Squirrel Girl a bonus active ability, which allows her to web up enemies via a special web bomb.Storming IgnitionStormHuman TorchStorm and Human Torch can combine their ultimates together to create a massive, flaming tornado.Fastball SpecialWolverineHulk, The ThingHulk or The Thing can agree to team-up with Wolverine with a button press, allowing either of them to throw Wolverine a great distance.Fantastic FourInvisible WomanMister Fantastic, Human Torch, The ThingInvisible Woman grants Mister Fantastic, Human Torch, and The Thing a new ability, which gives them increased damage resistance and continually generating bonus health.Arcane OrderDoctor StrangeScarlet WitchDoctor Strange replaces Scarlet Witch's Chthonia Burst with Mystic Burst, an attack that allows her to fire a salvo of missiles.Stars AlignedCaptain AmericaWinter SoldierWinter Soldier gains the ability to jump to a designated ally and do a slam attack. Captain America and Winter Soldier can agree to collide and create a slowing shockwave that damages nearby enemies.Mental ProjectionEmma FrostMagneto, PsylockEmma Frost can link with Magneto and Psylock to create duplicates of either or both, confusing enemies.

Update (April 11): We have removed the unavailable Team-Ups from this chart — Metallic Chaos and Voltaic Union — but will add them back in if they return.

As NetEase Games adds new heroes to Marvel Rivals, new Team-Up abilities will also appear in-game.

For more Marvel Rivals guides, here’s a list of maps and modes, plus the Marvel Rivals roadmap.

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There are very few flaws with Blue Prince, a new indie puzzle game about exploring a mansion whose room layout changes daily — with said room placement decided by the player as they explore and discover the mysterious properties of each room and the mansion as a whole. The game does have a big problem for a certain segment of players, however, which is that it has color-based puzzles in both the Billiard Room and the Utility Closet, and there’s no setting as yet to make these puzzles more accommodating for colorblind players.

Polygon has reached out to the developer to learn when the color assist mode will be available, but has yet to hear back. At this time, it’s a listed option in the game’s settings, but it’s grayed out, as it has not yet been released. This screen notes that it’s a feature that’s “currently being developed and tested and will be included in a forthcoming update. This is a priority for us, so thank you for your patience.”

There is some minor good news for colorblind folks who don’t want to wait to play this game, however, which is that you don’t need to solve these particular puzzles in order to make progress or even complete the game. [Ed. note: Minor descriptions of the puzzles follow in the next paragraph. If you don’t want to know any details at all about Blue Prince’s puzzles, don’t read on.]

The Billiard Room puzzle, for example, appears every time you choose that room to be included in your daily mansion layout, but you can skip the puzzle that’s in the room and keep on walking through the rest of the mansion and solving the larger mysteries in the game. Solving the daily puzzle in the Billiard Room does reward you with great (different) items every time, but these are items that you can earn through other means. The Utility Closet puzzle is a different situation in that you only need to solve it one time, and then you’re all set, and it also isn’t a puzzle you have to solve to beat the game, but it will give you a specific permanent item-related benefit if you solve it. Asking a friend for help with it might be a good move in the meantime.

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Humble Choice is easily one of the most overlooked gaming subscriptions. Brought to you by the same people responsible for the Humble Bundle, Humble Choice serves up a rotating catalog of DRM-free games that you get to keep forever, in addition to an array of other cool benefits, for just $129 a year, or $11.99 month-to-month. Humble Choice is a fantastic value when compared to the annual cost for services like Game Pass Ultimate ($240) or PSN Plus Extra ($159.99), which don’t let you access their game library when you cancel your subscription.

This month, Humble Choice subscribers get access to the eldritch fishing simulator Dredge, 1000XResist, Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered, Aliens: Dark Descent, and four other awesome titles. But if you don’t see something you like, don’t worry. Humble Choice also gives you access to the Humble Vault, which contains over 100 DRM-free titles for you to check out whenever you like. In addition to getting this massive library of PC titles, Humble Choice subscribers also enjoy discounts of up to 20% on select titles from the Humble store (including many first-party titles for the Nintendo Switch).

Like with the company’s other bundles, a portion of your Humble Choice subscription fee goes to support a charity. This month, 5% of your subscription will benefit One Tree Planted, a humanitarian organization that combats deforestation around the world.

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What’s the best movie I can watch on Netflix? We’ve all asked ourselves this question, only to spend the next 15 minutes scrolling through the streaming service’s oddly specific genre menus and getting overwhelmed by the constantly shifting trend menus. Netflix’s huge catalog of movies continues to expand day by day, week by week, month by month. This makes keeping up to date with best the service has to offer — let alone finding something to watch after a long day — a task that feels herculean at best and impossible at worst for someone not plugged into its inscrutable rhythms.

We’re here to help. For those suffering from choice paralysis, we’ve narrowed down your options to not only our favorite current movies on the platform, but the best movies Netflix has to offer.

If you’re looking for a specific genre, we’ve got the best action movies on Netflix, the best horror movies on Netflix, the best thrillers on Netflix, the best sci-fi movies on Netflix, and the best comedy movies on Netflix ready for you.

We’ll be updating this list as Netflix cycles movies in and out of its library, so be sure to check back next time you’re stuck in front of the app’s home screen.

How we pick the best movies on Netflix

Polygon’s staff consistently keeps up with new Netflix originals and titles added to the streaming platform, adding to this list with the best movies across both Netflix productions and library titles. We prioritize quality, unique artistic vision, and variety — different genres, different eras, different vibes, different filmmaking nations — to make sure every reader finds multiple options that interest them, as well as movies they may have never encountered before.

Athena

Director: Romain GavrasCast: Dali Benssalah, Sami Slimane, Anthony Bajon

One of the very best movies of 2022, Athenais an intense action thriller about the uprising of a French banlieue after repeated police harassment and violence. Told through the eyes of three brothers with very different perspectives on the conflict and how it should be resolved, Athena is a powerful story. But where it really shines is in its technical acumen. Music video director Romain Gavras, making his feature debut, brings breathtaking tracking shots, intricately choreographed blocking, and an absolutely electric energy. I have qualms with the ending, but I’ll never forget the jaw-dropping experience of watching Gavras cook on this movie. Whatever he does next, I’m there. —Pete Volk

Atlantics

Director: Mati DiopCast: Ibrahima Traoré, Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow

It’s hard to talk too much about Atlantics without giving away what makes the experience of watching it so special. It’s a beautiful, haunting love story with a tangibly beating heart, touching on romance as well as grief, class, labor, and the lingering effects of oppression. Shot gorgeously by director Mati Diop and cinematographer Claire Mathon, it was the first movie directed by a Black woman to be featured in competition in Cannes (it won the Grand Prix award, losing out on the Palme d’Or to Parasite), and is one of the most remarkable feature film debuts for a director in recent memory. —PV

Carol

Director: Todd HaynesCast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson

Todd Haynes’ most recent movie was the straight-to-Netflix gem May December, one of the best releases of 2023 and another movie on this very list. But this month, one of Haynes’ other masterpieces returns to Netflix after being away from the service for most of the year.

Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Carol follows an affair between two women at very different points in their lives. Therese (Rooney Mara) is an aspiring photographer who works at a department store, where she meets Carol (Cate Blanchett), a gorgeous older woman going through a difficult divorce. The two fall deeply in love in this lushly drawn, beautifully shot period romance that earned six Oscar nominations and kickstarted a stretch for Haynes of releasing a new movie every other year since. Haynes is an essential part of the New Queer Cinema movement, and Carol is an essential piece of 21st-century queer filmmaking. During this Pride month, or any other, don’t miss it. —PV

Do the Right Thing

Director: Spike LeeCast: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, John Turturro

Taking place over the course of a swelteringly hot day in Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing follows a rotating cast of characters as it traces the fault lines of racial tension between the neighborhood’s African-American locals and the Italian-American owner of a local pizzeria. From the film’s iconic shadowboxing opening featuring Rosie Perez, the beautiful and intimate cinematography of frequent Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson, to its explosive and heart-wrenching finale, Do The Right Thing is unquestionably not only one of the greatest films the director has ever produced, but one of the most essential entries in the canon of American cinema. —Toussaint Egan

Emily the Criminal

Director: John Patton FordCast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Gina Gershon

One of the smartest movies about the gig economy and our modern money struggles, Emily the Criminal was criminally (ayyy) underappreciated when it came out in 2022. The movie follows a debt-ridden woman (Aubrey Plaza) who gets involved in a credit card scam to pay off her student loans. This pulls her in the orbit of charismatic ringleader Youcef (the reliably handsome Theo Rossi), and also deeper and deeper into the world of crime, as she looks for a way out of her difficult situation.

It’s a career-best performance from Plaza, who is as funny and dry as ever, but Emily the Criminal’s script allows her to use her dramatic chops in ways we’ve rarely seen outside of White Lotus and Ingrid Goes West (and even those are primarily comedies with dramatic elements). Relentlessly paced, constantly tense, and always centered on the terrific leading performance at its core, Emily the Criminal is one of the best American films of the decade, and its potency will only grow as the problems it shines a light on continue to be exacerbated. —PV

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Director: George MillerCast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke

In 2015, George Miller released Mad Max: Fury Road, a post-apocalyptic tour de force that rocketed to the heights of the box office and reasserted Miller’s status as an action auteur of the highest caliber. Nearly a decade later, Miller released Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, to a comparably tepid and muted response. In spite of this, I believe time will be kind to Miller’s follow-up, which deftly builds upon the framework of the previous film to weave together an origin myth worthy of its titular protagonist.

The film is not only an explosive spectacle, but a lesson in the futility of revenge for revenge’s sake, the redemptive power of love, and the indomitable will to survive in a world rife with senseless cruelty and barbarism. I think that’s a sentiment worthy of holding on to, now more than ever, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga communicates that in spectacular fashion. —TE

Ghosts of Sugar Land

Director: Bassam Tariq

Director Bassam Tariq recently got replaced on Marvel’s upcoming Blade movie, and it’s as good a reason as any to catch up with his masterful 2019 short. Best known for the hip-hop drama Mogul Mowgli starring Riz Ahmed, Tariq’s previous movie is an enthralling documentary well worth the 21-minute running time.

Ghosts of Sugar Land is about a young group of friends in the suburbs of Texas, and what happens when one of them becomes radicalized by ISIS. A compelling portrait of an America we don’t often get to see depicted on screen, Tariq offers no easy answers, instead leaning on the shock and despair of the friends left behind, and on the dangers of isolation and loneliness in a country that often seems on the brink of collapse. A winner of multiple festival awards, including the 2019 Sundance Short Film Jury Award, Ghosts of Sugar Land is not to be missed. —PV

Godzilla Minus One

**Director:Takashi YamazakiCast:**Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Hidetaka Yoshioka

This month, one of 2023’s best movies is finally available to stream for Western audiences. Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One takes the franchise back to its roots: the disillusionment of Japan’s postwar era. The King of the Monsters is once again a metaphor for atomic weapons, but where Minus One really makes its mark is with the human characters who strive again annihilation.

Ryunosuke Kamiki plays Kōichi Shikishima, a former kamikaze pilot buried under a mountain of survivor’s guilt, with Minami Hamabe as Noriko, the woman he can’t bring himself to marry. Rounding out the cast are more adventure staples, like the trio of loyal and comedic co-workers, including the older scientist who has the right plan to defeat the monster (Hidetaka Yoshioka). The key to Godzilla Minus One isn’t that the ingredients are unusual, but in Yamazaki’s presentation and execution of this full-throated anti-war, pro-hope, anti-military, throwing-shade-on-America war blockbuster.

Minus One accomplishes the rare feat of making the human drama of a Godzilla movie as compelling as the monster action — and the monster action is really, really good. Godzilla Minus One was the best time many Polygon staffers had in a movie theater in 2023, and now we can finally watch it at home. —Susana Polo

Grave of the Fireflies

Director: Isao TakahataCast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara

Grave of the Fireflies is unlike any other film Studio Ghibli has produced to date. It is a war story, though not in the fantastical sense like Howl’s Moving Castle or The Boy and the Heron: It’s a tragedy about a pair of siblings who labor under the devastation brought about by the conclusion of the Pacific War, and who are faced with the absolute worst that humanity has to offer yet still manage to eke out a few precious, albeit fleeting, moments of happiness and love. It is, without question, one of the most affecting, bittersweet, and beautiful anti-war dramas ever produced, and a bona fide gem in a filmography studded with treasures.

Isao Takahata’s body of work may not be as highly lauded as that of Hayao Miyazaki’s, but his animation is not any less impactful, poignant, or transcendently moving. Grave of the Fireflies is not a film for the faint of heart. It is, however, a movie that I maintain every serious appreciator of the medium of animation, let alone anime, should see at least once in their life, if only for the fact that neither your life nor your understanding of animation will ever be the same after having watched it. —TE

Heat

Director: Michael MannCast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer

Michael Mann’s 1995 crime-thriller stars Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna, an eccentric and hyper-competent police detective caught in a tense cat-and-mouse struggle, and Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley, a career criminal. It’s a film made of moments and set-pieces that could comprise an entire third-act finale in a lesser movie. Here, they exist in a triumphant assemblage of carefully interlocking components; working in concert with the precision of a Swiss timepiece.

Pacino and De Niro deliver two of their greatest performances as a pair of obsessive workaholics whose razor sharp proficiency at their trades comes at the cost of all they otherwise love or hold dear. Dante Spinotti’s cinematography transforms the vast cityscape of Los Angeles into a shimmering expanse of lights strobing across the surface a sea of pitch darkness, a den of moral inequity from which no soul emerges wholly clean or unscathed. —TE

Hit Man

Director: Richard LinklaterCast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio

Richard Linklater returns with this Netflix Original that is at once one of his most straightforwardly enjoyable and commercial films since School of Rock, and one of his slipperiest. Adapted by Linklater and star Glen Powell from a magazine article about a Texan professor who moonlit for the police as a fake contract killer in a quasi-entrapment scheme, Hit Man takes this unbelievable truth and spins it into a shaggy-dog story that’s at once romantic, hilarious, broad, philosophical, and quietly dark. The film’s as elusive as its shape-shifting subject and will leave you with plenty to think about — but not before you’ve laughed, clapped, and marveled at a showstopping rom-com climax that puts Powell and costar Adria Arjona right at the peak of the genre. —Oli Welsh

Jigarthanda DoubleX

Director: Karthik SubbarajCast: Raghava Lawrence, S.J. Suryah, Nimisha Sajayan

Movies about the Power of Cinema™ can be self-important, saccharine, and worst of all, boring. Jigarthanda DoubleX is none of those things. A sprawling tale of gangsters, movie stars, politicians, and the people caught between them, it’s one of my favorite movies of 2023, and a truly special film.

It’s the 1970s, and a coward who believes it’s his destiny to become a cop gets framed for a quadruple murder. He gets released from prison by a corrupt movie star/politician on the condition that he kills one of the lieutenants of that movie star/politician’s rival. Naturally, our coward poses as a movie director, because his target (a notorious gangster who loves Clint Eastwood) has made it his new mission in life to be the first dark-skinned movie star in India. While making their silly movie (a biopic of the gangster, of course), they fall in love with the magic of cinema and its transformative power on a personal and societal level.

Jigarthanda DoubleX is firing on all cylinders throughout its nearly three-hour run time, with superb direction, complex characters fully embodied by terrific actors, thrilling action sequences, and a surprising amount of emotional depth for a movie with this outlandish of a premise. Don’t miss it. —PV

The Killer

Director: David FincherCast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Sala Baker

The Killer is too good to fit into any specific boxes. David Fincher’s latest movie, once again a Netflix-only release like Mank, feels distinctly post-genre. Sure, technically it’s a thriller about an assassin who botches a hit and has to deal with the consequences, which include a price on his head too. But it’s so much more than, like a comedy about one bad day of work, or a tragedy about a guy who loves The Smiths too much. Fincher’s real flex in The Killer is to present all of these seemingly competing genres and styles as one consistent tone where no moment ever feels out of step with another, whether it’s jokes about McDonald’s or bone-crunching fights.

Aside from Fincher’s technical skills, the other thing that makes The Killer’s dexterity possible is Michael Fassbender’s terrific performance as the assassin at the movie’s center. Fassbender goes from a winding monologues about the requirements of precision in every aspects of one’s life, to lamenting his latest fuck up in a moment’s notice without ever losing his put-on bravado. And it’s hilarious every single time.

This constant snapping between self-serious thriller and parody keeps every second of the movie fresh and makes it one of the best that Netflix has to offer. —AG

The Man from UNCLE

Director: Guy RitchieCast: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander

Director Guy Ritchie is experiencing a bit of a renaissance thanks to his Netflix series The Gentlemen, which premiered on the platform in 2024. The Gentlemen is a perfect showcase for Ritchie’s talent for writing fast-talking British criminals, but it’s another movie on Netflix that might be his high-water mark for purely fun filmmaking: The Man from UNCLE.

Loosely adapted from the television series of the same name, the movie follows two competing spies, one an American (Henry Cavill) and the other from Russia (played by Armie Hammer), facing off in a clandestine mission in the midst of the Cold War. Of course, as with any great espionage movie, especially an action comedy like this one, there are plenty of wild ruses and ridiculous twists along the way.

While certain metatextual elements of the film (namely Armie Hammer’s involvement) have aged somewhat poorly, the movie remains a tremendously fun time, with some of Ritchie’s funniest writing ever bolstered by Cavill and an incredible supporting cast that includes Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Debicki, Jared Harris, and Hugh Grant. On top of all that, The Man from UNCLE also makes a pretty excellent pairing with Apple TV Plus’ Slow Horses, if you want a double dose of spying. —AG

May December

Director: Todd HaynesCast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton

The Oscars are this weekend (or, at least, they are when I’m writing this), so I thought it would be fitting to recommend one of the bigger Oscar snubs of the year. Yes, May December got nominated for its (great) screenplay, but it is also one of the best films of 2023 and features three of the most outstanding performances of the year, none of which had room in a stacked nominations list.

The latest film from New Queer Cinema icon Todd Haynes (Carol, Safe) sees the legendary director reunite with frequent collaborator Julianne Moore for one of their most intriguing projects yet. May December follows an actor, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who travels to Georgia to prepare for a role based on Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who became a focus of national attention after sleeping with (and eventually marrying) Joe, a 13-year-old boy when their relationship first started.

It’s an uncomfortable setting, and Haynes leans into that discomfort, both through the patience of his camera and the excellence of his lead actors. As Gracie and Elizabeth attempt to suss each other out, their identities fluctuating and blending with each other (Haynes has been very vocal about the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona on this film), caught in the middle is Joe. Melton’s performance is haunting, a boy in a man’s body still caught in his teen years, closer in age to his children than to his wife. It’s the kind of adult drama we don’t get enough of anymore, and I’m glad Haynes is still here to make these kind of movies. —PV

My Oni Girl

Director: Tomotaka ShibayamaCast: Kenshô Ono, Miyu Tomita, Shintarô Asanuma

The latest anime movie from the director of the charming 2020 film A Whisker Away(also on Netflix) starts in a place that’s going to seem mighty familiar to longtime anime viewers: A shy, uptight boy has his world upended by a loud, cheerfully demanding girl, and adventures ensue. But My Oni Girl writer-director Tomotaka Shibayama and co-writer Yûko Kakihara (Trapezium,Apothecary Diaries, the 2020s Urusei Yatsura) subvert the usual script pretty quickly, making it a sweet, rewarding surprise.

The film has some fairly fuzzy story logic that may keep viewers guessing or discussing: What the heck is an oni in this movie, anyway? When a girl with purple-pink hair and a single delicate horn drops into the life of Hiiragi Yatsuse, a quiet boy whose schoolmates frequently take advantage of his polite eagerness to please, they end up on an episodic cross-country road trip together to look for her mother.

Along the way, Hiiragi finds out that his tendency to repress and hide his emotions is turning him into an oni, too — though in this world, oni just seem to be people with horns, and there’s no sign that any of the rest of them repress their emotions. The oni girl, Tsumugi, is certainly unrepressed — and a role model for Hiiragi in many ways.

My Oni Girl owes a clear debt to Studio Ghibli — not just in the extended shout-out to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away(which Shibayama worked on as a digital ink-and-paint artist), but in the character dynamics, and some of the spookier supernatural imagery. As Hiiragi supports, saves, and grows fond of his upbeat new friend, they both become targets for creatures they don’t understand, and unraveling what’s going on and what they need to do about turns what starts as a small domestic film into a big, winning adventure. —Tasha Robinson

The Night Comes for Us

Director: Timo TjahjantoCast: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle

The Night Comes for Us just fucking whips, OK? Why waste time on subtlety and preamble; the film certainly doesn’t! Indonesian action thrillers have been enjoying a renaissance period ever since Gareth Evans’ 2011 film The Raid kicked the door down and mollywhopped everything else in sight. Timo Tjahjanto’s 2018 film certainly follows in the footsteps of Evans’ own, with The Raid star Joe Taslim starring here as Ito, a gangland enforcer who betrays his Triad crime family by sparing the life of a child and attempting to flee the country.

Fellow The Raid star Iko Uwais shows up here as Arian, Ito’s childhood friend and fellow enforcer, who is tasked with hunting down Ito and recovering the girl. The action comes fast and frenzied here, with kinetic choreography and dazzling handheld cinematography that makes every punch, fall, and stab count. If you need to get your adrenaline pumping, throw this one on. —TE

Parasite

Director: Bong Joon HoCast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Cho Yeo-jeong

Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite is a many-featured organism as terrifying as it is darkly hilarious. Song Kang-ho (Memories of Murder) stars as Kim Ki-taek, the patriarch of an impoverished family just barely making a living out of the basement apartment they live in. When his son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) gets a job as an English tutor for a wealthy family living in an extravagant modern home, the two families slowly yet surely intertwine in a symbiotic spiral of greed, exploitation, and class before exploding into a shockingly unpredictable finale. Trenchant social commentary combined with a breadth of memorable performances culminate in a remarkable film that’s more than the sum of its parts. —TE

Psychokinesis

Director: Yeon Sang-hoCast: Ryu Seung-ryong, Jung Yu-mi, Park Jeong-min

From Korean animator Yeon Sang-ho — best known for his jump to live action, 2016’s zombie knockout Train to Busan (also on Netflix) — Psychokinesis follows Shin, a bumbling, borderline-alcoholic security guard who drinks from a mountain spring recently infected by a meteorite and gains telekinetic powers. Ryu Seung-ryong is a joy as the oaf, who’s learning to control his abilities just as his estranged daughter re-enters his life and sucks him into a real-estate-driven class war. Psychokinesis plays Shin’s “fighting style” for laughs, and while it’s not as cartoonish as Chinese director Stephen Chow’s genre hybrids, the movie can make the flying object mayhem both cheeky and thrilling. The political edge gives weight to Shin’s superpowered decisions, but Sang-ho never loses sight of why everyone showed up: to push the psychic conceit to bigger and bigger heights. —Matt Patches

Space Sweepers

Director: Jo Sung-heeCast: Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu

Set in the year 2092, Jo Sung-hee’s Space Sweepers follows the crew of freelance garbagemen in space who discover a strange childlike robot named Dorothy containing a nuclear device. Hoping to ransom Dorothy in exchange for enough money to escape their poverty-stricken lives, their plan quickly escalates into a chase to stay one step ahead of the military force of a corrupt corporation. Though it’s far from the most original of sci-fi premises, Space Sweepers is still a visually impressive film with great action and a likable cast of dysfunctional characters with great chemistry. —TE

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. ThompsonCast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac

2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a genuine before-and-after moment in the history of American animation. The film not only introduced a new generation of audiences to Miles Morales, but sent a shockwave through the entire industry through its pioneering approach to CGI animation that drew heavily from the texture and techniques of comic book storytelling. In short, it was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. How exactly do you top that?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse feels like an answer to that question on several fronts; visually, tonally, and technically. Miles is faced with a personal and moral dilemma in the form of the Spot, a dimension-hopping supervillain whose vendetta against Spider-Man threatens to endanger the entire multiverse. If that weren’t enough, Miles inadvertently runs afoul of Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), the leader of a group of Spider-People from alternate universes, who believes Miles himself is the source of the problem.

From its spectacular fight sequences to its gorgeous multiversal vistas to its absolutely bangin’ soundtrack, Across the Spider-Verse steps up to the challenge of following up one of most acclaimed American animated films in years and nails it out of the park. It’s a genuine sight to behold. With one more movie on the way, the question circles back: How exactly are they gonna top this? —TE

The Summit of the Gods

Director: Patrick ImbertCast: Lazare Herson-Macarel, Eric Herson-Macarel, Damien Boisseau

This 2021 French-language animated drama centers on Makoto Fukamachi, a tenacious reporter who accidentally stumbles upon the biggest mountaineering story of the century: Proof that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, not Sir Edmund Hillary, were the first climbers to reach the peak of Mount Everest in 1924. However, his only lead to break the story — an elusive mountain climber known as Habu Joji — has been missing for several years. Poring over the details of Joji’s life in the years preceding his disappearance, Makoto finds himself inadvertently drawn by the very same sense of accomplishment and meaning that has compelled countless climbers to crest Everest themselves.

Based on Jiro Taniguchi’s 2000 manga series, The Summit of the Gods is a gorgeously animated drama about the elusive quest for personal and professional validation and the perils of hubris and selfishness. The backgrounds are spectacular, the character animation is impressive, and the film’s final moments are as exhilarating as they are profoundly edifying. Brace yourself for a film that exemplifies “adult animation,” not as a juvenile display of hyper-violence and superficial titillation, but as a story about what it means to move through the world as an adult and find one’s place and purpose in it. —TE

They Cloned Tyrone

Director: Juel TaylorCast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris

If a pulp mystery-thriller that plays out like a Blaxploitation-style take on Jordan Peele’s Us by way of the anti-authority storytelling of Boots Riley sounds enticing to you, They Cloned Tyrone is an absolute must-watch.

John Boyega stars as Fontaine, a streetwise hustler who is gunned down after an altercation with a rival drug dealer. Miraculously, Fontaine wakes up the next morning completely unharmed with no memory of the confrontation whatsoever. Together with the help of local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and a retired sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), Fontaine stumbles upon a terrifying secret: His neighborhood is the site of a clandestine government operation experimenting with cloning technology and subliminal manipulation. Faced with the existential terror of this revelation, the trio must either expose this conspiracy or surrender to the roles ordained to them.

Sharply well written, brilliantly performed, and studded with satisfying surprising and twists up to its very last minutes, They Cloned Tyrone is a standout of recent Netflix movies. —TE

Upgrade

Director: Leigh WhannellCast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson

Sci-fi dystopias are rarely as fun as Leigh Whannell’s fiendishly gory cyberpunk film. Set in the not-so-distant future, Upgrade centers on the story of Grey, an auto mechanic who is rendered a quadriplegic after suffering a near-fatal gunshot from a gang of men responsible for murdering his wife. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that doesn’t sound fun at all; it isn’t.

The fun part actually kicks in when Grey is implanted with an experimental AI-assisted prosthesis that, in addition to restoring his ability to walk, also grants him the power to kick some serious ass — though at the expense of granting the AI complete, albeit momentary, control over his body. The real shining quality of Upgrade is not just its production design, with futuristic interior architecture juxtaposed with dilapidated urban environments and abandoned factory floors, but its inventive fight cinematography and camerawork using a smartphone and an ARRI ALEXA Mini camera. It’s certainly not a joyful film by any stretch of the imagination, but Upgrade’s action sequences alone are exhilarating and entertaining enough to make it worth watching the entire film as a whole, which I gotta say, is not bad at all. —TE

Wingwomen

Director: Mélanie LaurentCast: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch

There’s a place for movies like Alien, where a script written for a male lead character was left unchanged when a woman was cast in the role. But there’s also a place for movies like Wingwomen, an action comedy that thrives in its specificity around its characters and their experiences as women in our world.

In Wingwomen, Carole (director-star Mélanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds) has a very close and protective relationship with younger Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) — a found family situation. They are both caught in the web of crime lord Marraine (Isabelle Adjani) and looking for a way out. When they meet a new member of their team — skilled racer Sam (Manon Bresch) — they see an opportunity for one last score to break away from their life of crime and live peacefully together.

Fun, exciting, and endearing, you will not have more fun at the movies than watching Wingwomen. I wish for 20 more years of Laurent directing and starring in fun genre pictures — especially if they also star Exarchopoulos, who between this and Passages delivered two of the most memorable performances of 2023. —PV

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

For longtime movie-lovers Ryan Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni, the 2020 lockdowns turned a New Jersey attic into a welcome creative pressure cooker. The pair always dreamed of making a movie, but the uncertainty of the moment — not to mention the tight quarters — created a sense of urgency. Under duress, vibes came pouring out.

The result was Gazer, an icy, paranoid neo-noir thriller peppered with elaborate horror visuals. It follows single mother Frankie Rhodes (Mastroianni) as she battles a rare neurological condition and a ticking custody clock — all while unraveling a mystery laced with conspiracy. At times, Frankie’s blurred perspective swirls the reality of Gazer into full-blown horror.

Producing their script wasn’t a guarantee of making a movie. When they exited the attic, Sloan, a former electrician, and Mastroianni, a working actor and musician, hustled to actually do the thing. They financed the film entirely on their own, juggling minimum-wage jobs to scrape together a budget and shooting the 16mm odyssey on the weekends. Gazer isn’t just a debut feature — it’s a defiant throwback to how indies used to be made, and an ode to the movies, from slow-cinema classics to splatter horror flicks, that inspired Sloan and Mastroianni to embark on the journey in the first place.

Sitting down with Polygon ahead of Gazer’s theatrical release, the collaborators reflect on the determination — and gross-out special effects — required to realize their dream. The pair also shared some exclusive behind-the-scenes photos from their big nightmare-sequence shoot.

Polygon: Gazer is quite slick for a debut feature. And you got into Cannes last year! How did you find the confidence to just go off and make it on your own?

Ryan Sloan: We’ve always wanted to make a movie. I think it appears we just kind of stumbled into it, but we’ve been studying and training on our own for many, many years. Ariella has been training as an actress since she was a kid, and I’ve been just consuming films with my mother and my friends growing up. I’ve always wanted to direct, but I didn’t think it was possible. Life gets in the way. You start doing something and suddenly 15, 20 years go by. Then there’s a pandemic, and you’re like, Hey, what the fuck are we doing? The world could end tomorrow and we’re still not doing anything remotely close to where we want to be or what we’ve dreamed about.

So how do we rectify that? We decide to just sit down and talk about where our mutual tastes lie. And luckily it was all in the same world.

How did you wind up making a movie about this particular woman, suffering from a very particular psychological disorder, which still has room for a dream sequence involving a flesh gun? Gazer goes a lot of places for a first movie!

Ariella Mastroianni: It all came out of the character study, the kind of examination of this woman who is going through such trauma. The reason why we treated the nightmare sequences the way we did is because the whole film is from Frankie’s perspective. This is a window into her psyche — how does it feel for her? How does that translate? How do we want the audience to feel? And I feel like if it is a nightmare for Frankie, it should feel like a nightmare for the audience. But as we’re writing, every time we approach a scene, we always ask ourselves, “Is this real? Is this honest? Is it fun?”

Sloan: And there were definitely moments where we would say, “This isn’t the movie we want to make,” and we would get rid of those ideas. The full flesh-gun, flesh-box thing was definitely just born out of Frankie trying to interpret her haunted past.

Ariella, did you know you would play Frankie while you were writing? Did you write a part you wanted to play?

Mastroianni: Because Ryan and I were co-writing, I forgot that we were writing for me, in a way. We were only focused on Frankie’s journey. Who is this person? I would kind of fill those details out later. But it’s a lot of the references for Frankie were male actors. So Gene Hackman in The Conversation or Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, the actor playing Jong-su. We had Alien, Sigourney Weaver. Or Björk in Dancer in the Dark. But yeah, I wasn’t really writing for myself. I’m very different from Frankie.

How much of the look of the film was born from wanting to make the type of movie you like to watch versus whatever the story demanded? There’s a clear love for a certain type of film bursting out of the seams of Gazer**, but it also feels intentional.**

Sloan: We used the way The Wrestler was shot as the rubric of what we would do in the real world. So we knew it would be handheld, we’d be following Frankie nonstop, and it would be a little manic here and there. When we’re in Frankie’s apartment, the camera’s still handheld, but it doesn’t move. It doesn’t pan. It doesn’t tilt, because that is the only place where she feels comfortable. In the nightmare sequences, we’re always on [tripod] sticks or steadicam, and we wanted to create a very symmetrical look throughout the nightmare sequence. So it always felt very haunting.

We also pushed the film stock as well to create this kind of ’80s grindhouse look, which is fun. But I think once we discovered in the writing process that we could go experimental in these nightmare sequences, it just got me very excited about the ’80s schlocky films that I grew up watching. Robert Bottin’s special effects on The Thing were a big influence. We were trying to do more of that, but obviously budgetarily, we couldn’t afford it. It’s expensive to do practical effects even if you’re doing them at such a small scale as us. The flesh gun was supposed to be the only Videodrome reference. The hand through the chest was trying to rip off The Juniper Tree with Björk!

[The special effects were] hard to crack the code on, and on the day, we worked with what we had. It was funny, with the nightmare stuff, because our entire team was not on our side. While we were doing that, our DP was like, “Listen, just when you get the footage back and you put it in, you see it with the edit, just be open-minded to maybe get rid of it.” [laughs]

How did you wind up with the nightmare sequences? Was it clear Gazer would have some horror DNA from the beginning?

Mastroianni: I find those sequences to be the most essential in terms of Frankie’s emotional life and her psyche. She’s dealing with two of the most physical things: She’s dealing with the death of her husband and the birth of her daughter. We’re presenting the film from Frankie’s perspective, and it feels to her like a nightmare — that’s what we kept saying during the writing process, “Everything that happened to Frankie is such a nightmare, and we should present it that way. We should allow genre or use genre to elevate the sense of Frankie haunted by something that she had done.” So yeah, once we allowed ourselves to do that, we just went with it and had so much fun.

Sloan: I love horror. Horror is one of my favorite genres I go to the movies for. Even if it’s a bad horror movie, I’m happy.

Mastroianni: Also, it presents you with something that’s, to me, more real than what reality is. Sometimes, if you are representing something very realistically, it’s like the kind of poetic system of genre, and horror, and all of it. It reveals more truth than I think the truth itself, in a way.

Gazer is out now in limited release.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

The Marvel Rivals tier list is proof of an inherent truth: not every hero (or villain) is built equally. In the competitive shooter’s season 1 (which added four characters, three maps, a battle pass, and skins), every character is technically viable, but there are some who are obviously more powerful than the rest.

Below, we’ve compiled a tier list showing the current Marvel Rivals meta (as of the release of season 1.5), giving each character a rank from “best of the best” (S-tier) to “avoid at all costs” (F-tier). Read on for the full Marvel Rivals tier list for season 1 as of the midseason update.

[Ed. note: Season 2 for Marvel Rivals started on April 11, introducing Emma Frost (a new vanguard) and a new map. Both of those things are sure to shake up the meta, but we’ll need some time before the dust settles to see exactly how things change. In the meantime, see below for the Marvel Rivals tier list as of season 1.5.]

Marvel Rivals season 1.5 tier list of best characters

Season 1.5 of Marvel Rivals sees the game in quite a healthy spot, with only nine characters falling in C-tier or below. For a game with 37 heroes, you’re hard-pressed to find a “bad” one — outside of maybe one.

While the tier list above (which we constructed in Tiermaker) showcases a general view of the season 1.5 update, we’ve broken down each rank in tables below, including brief explanations for why each character belongs in the tier we’ve placed them.

Finally, it’s worth noting here that tiers can look different at different ranks, with some high rank heroes barely being played in low ranks, and some low rank dominators falling off significantly at higher elo levels. As it’s still fairly early in season 1.5, this list is likely to change within a week or so, as the meta won’t cement until closer to season 2’s launch in a few more weeks.

S-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

As a rule, S-tier heroes are those that you should absolutely know how to play if you main their given role. Understanding how your Team-Up abilities work with all of these heroes is crucial to success — you’ll be seeing a lot of them in your games.

CharacterRoleWhy they're S tierDoctor StrangeVanguardDoctor Strange is one of the hardest to kill heroes in Marvel Rivals, and is exceptional at shielding his allies from big blasts. Paired with his unique portal and extremely powerful ultimate, he's a hard pick to beat for top tank.HelaDuelistHela is one of the most consistent damage dealers in the game if you're capable of hitting your shots. She can take down target after target and has some great Team-Ups.Invisible WomanStrategistInvisible Woman can pump out a lot of healing and control the battlefield with her various crowd control moves. Even better, her invisibility makes her difficult to lockdown and kill.LokiStrategistLoki is a lot of work to get right, but in the right hands, he is nearly impossible to kill and pumps out a lot of healing. His ultimate is also the best in the game, as it allows him to mirror any other character.Luna SnowStrategistLuna Snow has the best ultimate in Marvel Rivals, making all combat stop the moment she hits it. On top of this, she has great healing, damage, and stuns.MagnetoVanguardMagneto is the definition of a consistent tank. He's very hard to kill when he's playing selfishly, but can extend some of that safety to allies to make them much tankier during big moments.NamorDuelistNamor and his pets can deal massive amounts of damage from afar, rivaling characters like Hela. But what makes Namor so great is his immunity bubble, which lets him survive divers.Star LordDuelistStar Lord can dish out a lot of damage in a short amount of time, and he's very fast. That's a potent combo, and paired with his ultimate, it makes him a great choice for duelist players.StormDuelistStorm has one of the most powerful ultimates for a duelist in the game, and can guarantee kills or an empty objective zone. Paired with her quasi support abilities and season 1 buffs, she's become a menace overnight.Winter SoldierDuelistWinter Soldier is best known for his ultimate, which he can repeat multiple times to wipe teams. However, his hook and powerful primary fire make him a menace even while charging his ultimate.WolverineDuelistWolverine is the ultimate tank buster character, and is able to abduct high health targets and kill them away from their team. He strikes fear into the hearts of all tank mains.

A-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

Generally, A-tier heroes are great. They’re not the best heroes, nor do they come out on top in the. meta, but they’re extremely solid. All of these are heroes that anyone should be thankful to have on their team, but likely won’t catch a ban as you reach the higher ranks.

CharacterRoleWhy they're A tierCaptain AmericaVanguardCaptain America is an extremely versatile tank, capable of both blocking big hits to protect his team and dishing out damage to solo players who he catches alone.GrootVanguardGroot can technically do more damage than any other tank in the game, with his powerful walls. But his real value is as a frontline beast with a ton of health and powerful crowd control.Hulk/Bruce BannerVanguardHulk is extremely mobile and very difficult to kill in Marvel Rivals. He's a menace in the backline with massive damage and is able to protect his own supports with shields.MagikDuelistMagik is both slippery and great at dealing with multiple backline targets at once. This makes her a real menace for duelists and strategists, and she basically requires a tank to help their team deal with her.MantisStrategistMantis both helps her team deal loads of damage with her boost and keeps them healthy with heals over time. Paired with the second best healing ultimate, she's a great choice.PsylockeDuelistPsylocke is able to dive into the backline of the enemy team to get kills or attack from range, which makes her very versatile. Her ultimate is also extremely powerful and can shut down objective areas.Spider-ManDuelistSpider-Man is capable of dishing out a lot of damage and destroying a backline. While he takes a lot of work to learn, the results are worth it in the current meta.The ThingVanguardThe Thing is a difficult tank to deal with because of his crowd control immunities, which makes him effectively unstoppable.ThorVanguardThor is a fantastic bully tank, and can deal massive damage if he's given the support he needs to survive the enemy.VenomVanguardVenom is a highly mobile dive tank, and is able to quickly reach the backline. He doesn't deal a ton of damage, but acts as a powerful distraction for his enemies.

B-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

The B-tier heroes bring a lot to the table, but are situational and niche. Some of these heroes can be A- or S-tier in the right situation, but they just aren’t of the same caliber as the heroes above them in a general setting.

CharacterRoleWhy they're B tierAdam WarlockStrategistAdam Warlock is a very technical strategist, who is capable of dealing big damage and keeping his allies alive. His normal play is great, but his ultimate is capable of swinging entire games on its own.Black PantherDuelistBlack Panther is both fast and consistent, which is what you want in a duelist. He's also much easier to play than most of the other duelists.Cloak & DaggerStrategistCloak & Dagger offer very powerful heals and some pretty decent damage, all in a relatively easy to play package.HawkeyeDuelistHawkeye requires accurate aim, but he's the only hero capable of regularly one-shotting squishy targets, which makes him very valuable to a team.Peni ParkerVanguardPeni Parker is a very potent tank in the right situation. On defensive maps, she's able to hold the zone better than almost any other character.Iron ManDuelistOn his own, Iron Man is a decent hero that can dish out lots of damage, and has a powerful ultimate that can shut down anyone. Paired with his Hulk Team-Up, he is even more powerful.The PunisherDuelistThe Punisher is the shooter character in Marvel Rivals, and is able to shred through enemies with his two guns. His kit is a little limited, but he has what he needs to succeed in most situations.

C-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

The C-tier heroes are ones that just don’t seem worth playing when you compare them to the other options. However, they’re still playable, and viable on some teams or when used by certain players. You could really surprise the enemy team with a C-tier pocket pick, but you’d probably be better off learning a better hero altogether.

CharacterRoleWhy they're C tierIron FistDuelistIron Fist has extremely high burst potential and is very slippery. He does take a bit of practice to fully understand, but a good Iron Fist can destroy your backline in seconds.Jeff the Land SharkStrategistJeff has decent support capabilities with his normal kit, but the lack of a good healing ult really hurts him. Even so, his ultimate can win games if enemy players aren't paying attention.Moon KnightDuelistMoon Knight has a ton of area damage, making him capable of wiping and entire team if they're not careful. His Ankhs are easy to shutdown, but they’re on a low enough cooldown that he’s always getting decent damage out.Rocket RaccoonStrategistRocket Raccoon is able to automatically revive players with his B.R.B. device, which is a very powerful effect. Paired with decent healing and decent damage, he's a great pick when the S tiers are unavailable.Squirrel GirlDuelistSquirrel Girl is a very simple character, but her explosive nuts deal a lot of damage with very little effort. Her reworked ultimate in season 1 is also quite strong and can hunt down enemies.

D-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

Heroes in the D-tier are, quite frankly, pretty subpar. Not so bad that you’re going to automatically lose if you have one on your team, but bad enough that you should probably be picking a better option.

CharacterRoleWhy they're D tierBlack WidowDuelistBlack Widow can't one-shot targets, she struggles to have awareness around here because she's forced into first-person, and her ultimate is not great.Human TorchDuelistHuman Torch is capable of doing good damage, especially in his Team-up. However he’s hamstrung by his lack of mobility, which makes him an easy target for some of the most powerful duelists in the game.Scarlet WitchDuelistScarlet Witch does very low damage over time, even if that damage is reliable because it doesn't require aim. When paired with an ultimate that's powerful but very easy to encounter, she just doesn't bring enough value to a team.

F-tier characters in Marvel Rivals season 1.5

Heroes in the F-tier are bad and you shouldn’t play them. And while you should never flame your teammates in games like Marvel Rivals, you should be concerned if someone picks one of these heroes, as it’s a little too close to playing 4v5.

CharacterRoleWhy they're F tierMister FantasticDuelistMister Fantastic is a hybrid damage dealer and tank, but he's a bit too hybrid at the moment, so he isn't good at either role.

For more Marvel Rivals guides, here’s a list of all known codes, all Team-Up abilities, all maps and modes, and a look at the game’s roadmap.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Visitors to the sprawling theme-park ecosystem of Orlando, Florida will soon be able to ride what’s become one of the most talked about roller coasters on the planet, without booking an overseas trip to Japan. Epic Universe, Universal’s brand new theme park, opens on May 22, 2025 with Donkey Kong Country, a near-replica of the park that opened last year at Universal Studios Japan.

Donkey Kong Country is the only “portal-within-a-portal” at Epic Universe, meaning that you access the area by first going through a Super Nintendo World warp pipe entrance, then through another large “portal” toward the back of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Once through, visitors are transported into a lush, tropical landscape littered with barrels, palm trees, and piles of bananas. Guests can stop at the Bubbly Barrel, the area’s quick service eatery, for refreshments, like a Pineapple Banana Dole Whip. Music enhances the area’s ambience as various songs from the Donkey Kong games provide a banging bongo beat that reverberates throughout.

At the center is the imposing Golden Temple that houses the area’s only ride: the Donkey Kong themed roller coaster, Mine-Cart Madness.

On this ride, you board a 4-seater vehicle resembling a mine cart that appears to “jump” across mangled tracks, replicating Donkey Kong Country’s infamous rail-jumping level. The technology that brings this rail-jumping effect into real life is Universal’s patented “Boom coaster” concept. The ride vehicle is attached to an arm that extends far above the coaster’s real track, allowing ride designers to place fake minecart rails between riders and the coaster’s actual track.

This unique ride system has had the roller coaster community buzzing ever since the patent was made public as it really opens the floodgates for incredibly elaborate roller coaster theming. The patent even demonstrates several possibilities in addition to the rail-jumping effect, like gliding on clouds or jumping over obstructions on false tracks.

The unfortunate tradeoff with this new technology is that itmakes the ride a bit bumpy and shaky, especially considering it’s a brand new roller coaster that hasn’t officially opened to the public yet. Since the center of gravity of each vehicle is so high above the real coaster track, the slightest bounce, shake or jolt is accentuated and amplified; similar to how a skyscraper’s top floors sway more than its foundation when facing high winds.

After riding it for myself, I would say Mine-Cart Madness is not a ‘headbanger,’ that’ll rattle you until you puke, but even employees warned of the ride’s roughness compared to the park’s other family roller coasters.

While the rail-jumping effects are uncanny, the ride is much more tame than you might expect. This is no white-knuckle roller coaster. Mine-Cart Madness is more of a family ride that relies on its special effects to provide its thrills.

The first big moment of the ride involves an ascent to the ride’s highest point where your mine cart vehicle is shot out of a classic Donkey Kong barrel cannon. Despite the effects and fanfare, you’re not launched through the air at high speeds and instead slowly glide from the barrel cannon onto a set of tracks and into the ride’s first tunnel.

The ride never flips upside down and never sends riders backwards like many of the other Epic Universe coasters. While Universal hasn’t yet publicized the ride’s top speed, it felt slower than the park’s most kid-friendly coaster, Hiccup’s Wing Gliders, which has a top speed of 45mph. (We reached out to Universal for specifics on Mine-Cart Madness’s top speed but did not hear back in time for publication.) The ride’s height requirement also reflects that this coaster is suitable for young children as it’s only 40 inches. (Although, kids under 48 inches must be accompanied by a supervising adult.)

Despite its bumps, Mine-Cart Madness is still a stellar attraction due to its innovative technology and incredibly elaborate theming. It’s clear that Universal’s designers worked closely with Nintendo to ensure the ride stayed true to the iconic franchise for diehard fans, while also offering a world-class themed experience for families. It’s just a bit concerning that the ride experience is already feeling a bit rough before opening day, as no roller coaster gets smoother as it ages.

*[****Disclosure:***Reporting for this article was conducted out of a press event held at Epic Universe in Orlando, Florida on April 5. Universal provided Polygon’s accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.]

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Marvel Rivals is a competitive game set in the multiverse, so it’s fitting that you play on a number of different maps.

As of season 2 (which added a new character from the X-Men comics, Emma Frost), there are now 11 maps in Marvel Rivals, all inspired by locations from the Marvel Comics universe. You’ll play three modes across those maps.

There are also two arcade modes and maps, which offer a different gameplay style using the same heroes. Developer NetEase Games says it will add more maps and modes via the seasonal model for Marvel Rivals.

In this Marvel Rivals guide, we’ll walk you through all maps in Marvel Rivals season 2, alongside descriptions of the modes you’ll play on those maps.

All Marvel Rivals game modes in season 2

There are three main game modes in Marvel Rivals — Convoy, Domination, and Convergence — each played on specific maps, and available in both quick match and ranked. Here’s a rundown of the available game modes in Marvel Rivals as of season 2:

In Convoy, your team will be randomly assigned offense or defense to start. As offense, your objective is to escort a cart or moving object through the map by standing near it, which the defenders will attempt to stop by killing you and your teammates. If the offensive team escorts the convoy to the end of the map within a time limit, they win.In Domination, your team and the enemy team will attack a single point on one of a handful of small maps. Whoever captures the point must hold it until it reaches 100%. Whoever captures the point will take the lead. The mode will then jump to another small map and repeat the objective. The first team to reach two captured points wins.In Convergence, your team will randomly be assigned offense or defense to start. As offense, your objective is to attack the first checkpoint on the map and secure it by standing inside. Defenders will be able to reach the point before you, and their job is to kill any offensive players trying to get in. If the offense successfully captures a checkpoint in time, they’ll move along the map to the next checkpoint. If the offensive team can capture three checkpoints in time, they win.

There are also two arcade game modes, which allow you to play as the same roster of heroes in a less stressful environment:

In Conquest, you and 11 other players will battle in a free-for-all deathmatch on the Ninomaru map. When enemies die, they drop Chronovium, which you can collect. The first player to collect enough Chronovium wins.In Doom Match, you and 11 other players will battle in a free-for-all deathmatch on the Sanctum Sanctorum map. You are able to double-up on heroes in this mode, meaning you can get into a duel with a group of Peni Parkers or multiple Mister Fantastics. You get points for defeating enemies, and the top 50% of players at the end of the match win.

All Marvel Rivals multiplayer maps in season 2

There are 11 main maps and two arcade maps in Marvel Rivals, all of which take place in seven different regions of the Marvel Universe (pictured in the gallery above). There are multiple maps that take place in the same region, and maps are specific to the modes that are played on them — meaning there are no maps that you play both Domination and Convoy on.

Here is the full list of core maps in season 2 of Marvel Rivals, and the modes associated with each one:

Yggdrasill Path (Yggsgard) — ConvoyRoyal Palace (Yggsgard) — DominationShin-Shibuya (Tokyo 2099) — ConvergenceSpider-Islands (Tokyo 2099) — ConvoyBirnin T’Challa (Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda) — DominationHall of Djalia (Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda) — ConvergenceSymbiotic Surface (Klyntar) — ConvergenceHell’s Heaven (Hydra Charteris Base) — DominationMidtown (Empire of Eternal Night) — Convoy (added in season 1)Central Park (Empire of Eternal Night) — Convoy (added in season 1.5)Hellfire Gala (Krakoa) — Domination (added in season 2)

There are two unique maps that are only available in specific arcade modes as of season 2:

Ninomaru (Tokyo 2099) — ConquestSanctum Sanctorum (Empire of Eternal Night) — Doom Match

All retired ranked mode maps in Marvel Rivals season 2

With season 2, NetEase games has started to retiring some maps from competitive play. Below, we’ve listed out which maps you won’t find in the competitive playlist in anymore. Note that all maps are still available in quick match and custom games.

Here are the currently retired competitive maps in Marvel Rivals season 2:

Royal Palace (Yggsgard) — Retired in season 2Shin-Shibuya (Tokyo 2099) — Retired in season 2

For more Marvel Rivals guides, here’s a list of Team-Up abilities, plus the Marvel Rivals roadmap and how crossplay works.

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Blue Prince, an engrossing puzzle game about exploring a mysterious mansion that is never the same from one day to the next, is the first breakout indie game of 2025. It’s also currently the best-reviewed game of 2025 outright. You would think that would put it in contention for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, and you would probably be right, if it were November and not April. But Blue Prince’s place among the front-runners isn’t as secure as those of other games, like Split Fiction and Monster Hunter Wilds. Because at The Game Awards, all video games are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The main predictor of success in the gaming awards race is broad critical consensus, as reflected in a game’s rating on review aggregator sites Metacritic and OpenCritic. (With a 92 Metascore, Blue Prince has this sewn up.) But some genres of game, like racing or strategy, are never nominated for Game of the Year, no matter how well reviewed they are — while others, like role-playing and action-adventure, tend to dominate.

In between these sit indie games, a class of game defined not by its genre but (more or less) by the number of people it took to make it, and how much it cost to make. (How indie games are defined by The Game Awards is its own can of worms, but suffice to say that nobody will be arguing over Blue Prince’s indie credentials.) Indie games are often well represented among the best-reviewed games in any given year, but in the 11-year history of The Game Awards, only five indie games have ever been nominated for Game of the Year — and never more than one at a time. No indie game has won the coveted title yet. For indie games, the barrier for entry to gaming’s top prize is just that bit higher. And once one has been anointed, the rest often seem out of luck.

Take last year’s awards as an example. Balatro, the hugely popular card game by solo developer LocalThunk, secured a GOTY nomination as well as winning three other awards on the night. But other brilliant indie games like UFO 50 and Animal Well were passed over in the main category, despite critical reputations that were just as strong as Balatro’s and much stronger than one of the other nominees, Black Myth: Wukong.

For an indie game to be nominated for Game of the Year, high review scores and universal acclaim are even more important than for more mainstream titles. But profile is important, too. What separated Balatro from UFO 50 and Animal Well was the scale of its popularity among players and, particularly, among the critical community. It sold very well on its debut in February 2024 and got a handy bump from a well-timed mobile release in late September, just weeks before The Game Awards’ voting window. To put it simply, everyone was playing it.

The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of the four other indie games that have succeeded in breaking through into Game of the Year: Stray in 2022, Hades in 2020, Celeste in 2018, and Inside in 2016. All these games had a kind of virality, a moment when they dominated the gaming conversation. Cat adventure Stray’s moment was so significant that it overcame a lukewarm Metascore of 83 to secure a nomination. (It helped that Stray also has lush production values, something that the Game Awards jury is very drawn to, but that most indie games understandably lack.)

It is a little early to say, but Blue Prince certainly seems destined for such a moment. Anecdotally, I know more people in the games media community playing this game than any other release this year — even Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Blue Prince’s mysterious narrative and complex puzzles will sustain a long conversation about it, too. Like the other indie GOTY nominees, it feels very authored; you sense a strong voice behind it, in this case designer, writer, and director Tonda Ros. And while its initial Steam numbers indicate a modest hit, its ready availability on both Game Pass and the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog will help boost its profile.

There’s a big caveat, however. If another indie game comes along that is just as well reviewed and even more popular, Blue Prince’s nomination is toast, even if it’s more deserving than some of its more mainstream competition. Hades 2 is the obvious candidate. Supergiant’s sequel to its 2020 GOTY nominee has already found a huge audience in its early access version. It has the sheen and confidence of a sequel made on the back of a huge critical and commercial hit. It’s also a more approachable game than the enigmatic Blue Prince. If it leaves early access and launches in full on both PC and Nintendo Switch 2 this year, Hades 2 will surely steal Blue Prince’s nomination — if another indie sensation doesn’t come out of nowhere to do it first.

Maybe both Blue Prince and Hades 2 will appear among the final six come the end of the year, but that would be unprecedented. We should live in a world where two strikingly creative and well-executed indie games can be recognized as among the year’s best, especially considering how different these two are. We should also live in a world where one of them might actually win. But, for now, we don’t.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Usada Pekora is one of the biggest Vtubers in the world, but even she can’t withstand the might of Nintendo.

【お知らせ】ガイドライン違反を疑われるゲーム配信への対応に関するお知らせhttps://t.co/VadVl9BCec

— カバー株式会社 (@cover_corp) April 9, 2025

According to a report from Automaton, Nintendo recently contacted Cover Corporation, owner of the Vtuber talent agency Hololive Japan, over concerns Pekora may have used a hacked Pokémon Emerald cartridge during a March 29 broadcast. As modifying video game saves can be a serious crime in Japan and Nintendo’s streaming guidelines reserve the company’s right to “object to any content that we believe is unlawful,” Cover decided the best course of action would be to take down the stream archive and issue an apology on April 9.

“OK, but what the hell happened?” I can almost hear you all asking your computer screen. Let’s get into it.

The offending broadcast involved Pekora buying and investigating a bunch of used Pokémon Emerald cartridges in the hopes of finding one that contained a super rare item known as the Old Sea Map. The item, which provides access to a special area of the game wherein the player can track down and catch Mew, was distributed in 2005 at a handful of live events throughout Japan and as a gift for purchasing a ticket to the movie Lucario and the Mystery of Mew in Taiwan. During the stream, Pekora kept a running tally of the number of carts she checked, and wouldn’t you know it, the save on #22 had an Old Sea Map in its inventory.

Apologies in advance for the screaming.

Someone attended an event in Japan 2o years ago, got the Old Sea Map, for some reason never used it to acquire Mew, and Pekora was lucky enough to find this mystery person’s copy of Pokémon Emerald without having to dig through hundreds of cartridges. Pekora’s fans saw this as merely a stroke of luck, but others pointed out how odd it was all of these unlikely events managed to line up for a perfect stream moment. Her supposedly outsized good fortune, combined with some apparent irregularities in the item’s in-game text, led some viewers to believe the Old Sea Map may have been hacked into the game rather than obtained legitimately.

Pekora addressed the growing controversy on April 3. She explained the situation to viewers as a “gray zone” and announced she wasn’t going to continue her hunt for a shiny Mew, which after finding the Old Sea Map was the ultimate goal of her Pokémon Emerald streams.

“There’re suspicions that the ROM has been modified,” Pekora said in a video. “Pekora doesn’t want to do it if it’s fake, too. I won’t do it. So I put the Mew stream on pause. Who is right? I don’t know anymore. It’s honestly too suspicious so I don’t know. It will be meaningless if it’s fake. So I just won’t do it. That’s the decision I ended up with. I apologize for causing a fuss over this. I’m really sorry. I won’t be catching Mew anymore.”

In its apology letter, Cover promised to be more cautious as well as educate staff and talent to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. Neither Cover nor Nintendo have confirmed whether or not the cartridge was actually hacked.

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