Latest news with #Don'tNod
Engadget
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
PS Plus Monthly games for July include Diablo 4 and Jusant
Sony has revealed the PS Plus Monthly games for July as the subscription service is about to reach its 15th anniversary. Between July 1 and August 4, members on all tiers will be able to add Diablo IV (PS5 and PS4), The King of Fighters XV (PS5 and PS4) and Jusant (PS5 only) to their collection. The monthly games for June — NBA 2K25, Alone in the Dark (2024), Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and Destiny 2: The Final Shape — are available to claim until July 1. Diablo IV is the clear headliner this time around. The 2023 action RPG from Blizzard is just about to get a big update too , including the expansion of endgame dungeons and the addition of keyboard and mouse support on consoles. Don't Nod's Jusant is a really lovely, narrative-based climbing game, a fairly relaxing way to spend a few hours . SNK's The King of Fighters XV, meanwhile, retains the series' 3 vs. 3 tag fighting format and it includes rollback netcode to minimize lag while playing online. Meanwhile, June 29 marks the 15th anniversary of PS Plus. Sony is marking the occasion by offering free multiplayer to non subscribers this weekend, adding a couple of game trials ( WWE 2K25 and Monster Hunter Wilds ) for Premium members and offering discounts on games and Sony Pictures Core movies. The company says that, throughout the lifespan of PS Plus, it has made more than 500 monthly games available for subscribers to keep in their collection as long as they maintain their membership. Sony still isn't sharing PS Plus subscriber numbers, though it told Game File that the Premium tier has grown by 18 percent over the last year. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino recently said that PS Plus price increases are "partly a result of increasing value we bring to the players" and that they hadn't slowed down subscriptions. The company still has no plans to offer its own games on the service on their release date, unlike Xbox does with Game Pass, though it will continue to add some third-party games to PS Plus on day one.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New PS5 RPG IP Is 50% Off on PS Store for 1 More Day
The PS Store always has some great deals on some of the best PS4 and PS5 games. This includes this new IP from Don't Nod and Focus Entertainment. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is currently 50% off on the PS Store. That brings the price down to $29.99 instead of its typical $59.99 price tag. Players will have to act very fast if they want to take advantage of this deal. The offer ends on June 12 at 2:59 a.m. ET. 'New Eden, 1695. Antea Duarte and Red Mac Raith are lovers and Banishers, ghost-hunters who vowed to protect the living from the threat of lingering ghosts and specters,' reads the game's description. 'Following a disastrous last mission, Antea is fatally wounded, becoming one of the spirits she loathes. In the haunted wilds of North America, the couple desperately searches for a way to liberate Antea from her new plight.' Players who end up liking Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden can get some costume DLC for less than $5. Specifically, the Wanderer Set DLC is just $3.99 on the PS Store. When Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden launched early last year for PS5, it was met with somewhat favorable reception. According to the review aggregate site Metacritic, it received an average score of 78 across 68 critic reviews. Although Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is just one of many games developed by Don't Nod. One of its most recent releases, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, is available for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers at no additional cost. It also revealed its next game, Aphelion, during this year's Xbox Games Showcase. Make sure to check here to see all the deals we've highlighted throughout the various sales promotions on the PS Store here. The post New PS5 RPG IP Is 50% Off on PS Store for 1 More Day appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lost Records explores the joys and dangers of our cultural obsession with nostalgia
I finished Lost Records: Bloom and Rage several days ago, but I'm still thinking about it. Developed by Don't Nod, the creator of the successful Life Is Strange series, it's a narrative adventure about four girls in a town in Wyoming, who meet one summer, form a band, discover a strange supernatural force in the woods and then meet up 30 years later to dissect what exactly happened to them. It is about growing up, growing apart and processing trauma, seen through a nostalgic lens. We meet the lead characters as adults, and join them as they scour their shared past, revisiting old places – a shack in the woods, their teenage bedrooms, the local bar – and exhuming old feelings. Lost Records has an excellent feel for the mid-90s when the girls were 16: you can explore rooms and pick up artefacts such as game carts, diaries and mixtapes and, if you were around at the time, you absorb the nostalgia as keenly as the characters themselves. While playing I was struck at what a vital role nostalgia plays in video game design. I don't mean in the extrinsic sense of playing and remembering old video games, and I don't mean games that call back to old titles. I mean nostalgia as a central theme and a motivational force for characters. So many role-playing adventures are about unlocking the past through narrative archeology. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avowed, Journey, Outer Wilds and Heaven's Vault are all games in which your primary aim is to discover what happened to some ancient civilisation and, through it, your character's own legacy and identity. It's nostalgia that infects the landscape of The Last of Us as much as the deadly fungus – Ellie's love of old comics, songs and joke books; the repeated use of ruined museums, theatres and playgrounds as key locations – that Naughty Dog wanted to tap in to by repurposing our own nostalgia for lost childhood pleasures. I'm reading Agnes Arnold-Forster's excellent book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, which looks at the origins of the concept and how it was first considered a fatal disease of the mind, a sort of mortal home sickness. In Death Stranding, this idea is made physical in the shape of the Beached Things, the smoky tar-like spirits that haunt the game's ruined landscapes. Nostalgia is the perfect theme for video games, because we have the freedom to explore and discover in them. They immerse us in landscapes and provide countless objects for us to observe and interact with. They also allow us to collect our own mementoes – most major titles now have photo modes where we can capture specific scenes, composing and editing the footage to our specific emotional requirements. In Lost Records, you can record video footage on lead character Swann's camcorder; you do this throughout the game and then there's a lovely payoff, which reminded me a little of the unforgettable climax to Cinema Paradiso. What is particularly absorbing about Lost Records, however – and it has been one of the game's most controversial aspects – is that it deals in the inconsistencies of nostalgia as much as the comforts. It is unapologetically ambiguous, with its central mysteries remaining largely unresolved. There is no comfortable catharsis, no shock reveal – what the lead characters learn when they reunite is that memory is unreliable, perhaps even duplicitous. In this way, it reminded me a lot of independent genre cinema – We're All Going to the World's Fair, Skinamarink, It Follows. It is elusive and non-compliant. We often think about games as power fantasies, but they are equally fantasies of reconstruction and remembrance. Games make us yearn for worlds that were never there. Perhaps one day, some sort of brain-computer interface will allow role-playing adventures to be set in our own memories, our own nostalgic kingdoms. It sounds idyllic, but what video games have been trying to warn us is that our brains are unreliable narrators. Nostalgia is a door, but it's also a trap. If you were playing PC games in the mid-1990s, the chances are you were a fan of the real-time strategy genre. Dune II, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation … how the hours flew by as we harvested resources, built war machines and set out to destroy the other side's bases. Tempest Rising is a shameless paean to that era, set on an alternate 1990s Earth ruined by nuclear war and now housing two battling factions. The core loop of exploring, gathering, building and fighting is tight and compulsive, and the detailed visuals lend a modern sheen. Now let's have a new Advance Wars title for the Nintendo Switch 2. Available on: PCPlaytime: 20+ hours I love that Polygon has written a guide on how to take physical notes of the hit puzzle game Blue Prince. As someone who spent his childhood making maps of Commodore 64 adventures, I approve of this most tactile way to navigate games. Last year, I used multiple sheets of graph paper (complete with little flaps for hidden areas) to map Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and it was so fun to be back. The games industry can breathe a sigh of relief – it turns out Assassin's Creed Shadows has performed well, despite manufactured outrage over its use of a black samurai in the leading role. has a good opinion piece on the subject. Amid endless layoffs and studio closures, here's a piece from Eurogamer about how institutional memory helped make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle such an assured and entertaining game. It turns out that experienced teams who have worked together for years make good games together. Who'd have thought? Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two) – love, grief and self-recrimination as the girls reunite | ★★★★☆ Now Play This 2025 – the end of an era of experimental game design | Simon Parkin 'It's allowed me to see through his eyes': Super Mario, my dad and me Piece of the action: entering the British puzzle championship Super spicy! Jack Black's Minecraft song Steve's Lava Chicken becomes shortest ever UK Top 40 hit Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion This week's question comes from Andrew Wilcox, head judge and founder of the Cuprinol shed of the year competition, who asked via Bluesky: 'Why are there lots of sheds in games but no games about shed-building?' Considering how big the cosy games market is, you'd think some clever indie studio would have attempted a shed sim by now. Imagine pottering about in your own virtual wooden den, perhaps doing a spot of carpentry or sorting seeds to plant. You can build sheds in The Sims 4: Cottage Living and Farming Simulator, but these tend to have very specific utilitarian uses, such as grain storage. Anyway, I put the question to game designer and keen shed botherer, Will Luton, who has worked at Sega and Rovio and now runs the consultancy Department of Play. He said: 'There are two problems to consider here: what is the main action (AKA the core loop), and what are the ways you move through the game (AKA the progression vectors)? 'There are multiple ways you could address these. Is the main game more about designing the shed? Or are you making it to a specific design? This defines if it's more open-ended and creative (like Townscaper) or more systematic (like Car Mechanic Simulator). This decision also likely defines the type of interaction: isometric drag and drop v first-person traversal. 'Once you've made one shed, why do you want to make more? There must be some kind of 'unfolding' where new mechanics or possibilities unlock. So, for example, when you complete your first shed, you unlock a nail gun, which means you can assemble much quicker and more sturdily. Maybe now you can make sheds over 10sqm. Or perhaps you install electricity, which unlocks lighting and power tools. Maybe you have a shed yourself that you can constantly upgrade and add new tools to, which allows you to then make bigger and better sheds for clients. 'So to answer the question: there is no reason why someone hasn't made this game. Indeed, if the reader happens to have £500k, I'd help them to bring it to market.' If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lost Records: 'It's OK to make games for different audiences'
"What's in the box?" That's the question fans of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage have been asking since February, when the first part of the narrative adventure game dropped. The story follows a group of female friends, hopping between their lives as teenagers in the 1990s and as adults in the present. They are reunited by a mysterious package that threatens to expose a dark secret they've suppressed for 27 years. Part one, Bloom, was praised by fans for its characters and LGBT representation, even if it left them with an almighty cliffhanger to ponder. BBC Newsbeat caught up with creative director Michel Koch, executive producer Luc Baghadoust and lead actress Olivia Lepore to discuss the reaction to it, and what to expect from part two - Rage. Lost Records is made by Don't Nod, the original developers of The Life is Strange series, first released in 2015. The episodic adventure's narrative unfolded depending on player choices, and was praised for its emotional depth. It was also unafraid to tackle difficult subjects rarely seen in video games at the time. Lost Records is seen as a spiritual successor and uses a similar, episodic structure, split across two "tapes". While the first was well-received by critics, a common criticism was its slow pacing, with a heavy focus on characters and relationships over big story moments. Michel admits that was "definitely a gamble". But he says the team wanted to recreate the feeling of a never-ending teenage summer, focusing on "those moments of enjoying doing nothing in a world where we are always pressurised to do something". "Just sometimes having the opportunity to enter a world where you can be peaceful and enjoy the mood, I think it's important," he says. Lost Records features an all-female cast, LGBT themes and touches on social issues such as body image. That made it a target for what Luc and Michel call a "vocal minority" online who target releases they consider to be "woke". "We are in a weird time for that right now," says Michel. "We are making games for people who want those kind of games. "I think video games need to start to be more mature about that. "It's OK that there are a lot of different games and different genres and different audiences. "It doesn't mean that because something exists, it's a threat to the other things you like." Exec producer Luc admits the game is not for everyone but has so far had a "great reaction" from fans who've clicked with it. "We made a game we would want to play," he says. "It's a way to really express what you wanted to and reach a different audience." Lost Records has generated discussion around its portrayal of issues many teenagers deal with. When the game was first revealed there was a focus on the fact characters had visible acne scars - an unusual feature for a video game - and references throughout to Swann's struggles with her weight. Michel says the creators didn't want to make issues like this a main theme of the game. "But it's still present, because in the '90s, there was still, of course, the peer pressure from the parents to, I don't know, just start a diet," he says. The main focus of tape one, Michel says, was having the characters find a group of close friends who would accept them for who they were. "That's where you can start to accept yourself even more," he says. "Because they are the reflection of who you are and if they like you, it means that you are likeable and you can love yourself." Olivia Lepore, who plays main character Swann Holloway, tells Newsbeat a lot of the game's themes - and her character's story - resonated with her. "I think part of the reason I got this role is because we have so much in common," she says. "And I didn't feel like I had to put on a character playing her. I definitely just, in many ways, got to be myself." Olivia says that she's been blown away by the response from fans, who've identified with many of the themes and issues raised in the game. "I have gotten some really beautiful messages from fans about how they feel like they connect with Swann," she says. "I've been really touched by some of the messages to the point where it could be a bit overwhelming, because I just empathise so much with everybody's story." The Last of Us: Bella Ramsey talks season 2, autism, and growing up on screen Chloe Qisha: Rising pop star finding fame at just the right time Chappell Roan: 'There's a new path for girls breaking the rules' As for the conclusion of the story, Olivia says "expect the unexpected". "Wherever you think it's going. It's probably not," she says. Michel says choices players made in part one will play out in the second, which is set to go to some darker places - and be much more dramatic. "You can expect things to be, let's say, less happy and sunny and more gloomy than tape one. "And we can't wait for you to open the box." Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
BBC News
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Lost Records: Fans and creators anticipate release of 'Rage'
"What's in the box?"That's the question fans of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage have been asking since February, when the first part of the narrative adventure game story follows a group of female friends, hopping between their lives as teenagers in the 1990s and as adults in the are reunited by a mysterious package that threatens to expose a dark secret they've suppressed for 27 one, Bloom, was praised by fans for its characters and LGBT representation, even if it left them with an almighty cliffhanger to ponder. BBC Newsbeat caught up with creative director Michel Koch, executive producer Luc Baghadoust and lead actress Olivia Lepore to discuss the reaction to it, and what to expect from part two - Rage. Lost Records is made by Don't Nod, the original developers of The Life is Strange series, first released in episodic adventure's narrative unfolded depending on player choices, and was praised for its emotional was also unafraid to tackle difficult subjects rarely seen in video games at the time. Lost Records is seen as a spiritual successor and uses a similar, episodic structure, split across two "tapes".While the first was well-received by critics, a common criticism was its slow pacing, with a heavy focus on characters and relationships over big story admits that was "definitely a gamble".But he says the team wanted to recreate the feeling of a never-ending teenage summer, focusing on "those moments of enjoying doing nothing in a world where we are always pressurised to do something". "Just sometimes having the opportunity to enter a world where you can be peaceful and enjoy the mood, I think it's important," he says. Lost Records features an all-female cast, LGBT themes and touches on social issues such as body made it a target for what Luc and Michel call a "vocal minority" online who target releases they consider to be "woke"."We are in a weird time for that right now," says Michel."We are making games for people who want those kind of games."I think video games need to start to be more mature about that. "It's OK that there are a lot of different games and different genres and different audiences. "It doesn't mean that because something exists, it's a threat to the other things you like." Exec producer Luc admits the game is not for everyone but has so far had a "great reaction" from fans who've clicked with it."We made a game we would want to play," he says."It's a way to really express what you wanted to and reach a different audience." 'Expect the unexpected' Lost Records has generated discussion around its portrayal of issues many teenagers deal the game was first revealed there was a focus on the fact characters had visible acne scars - an unusual feature for a video game - and references throughout to Swann's struggles with her weight. Michel says the creators didn't want to make issues like this a main theme of the game."But it's still present, because in the '90s, there was still, of course, the peer pressure from the parents to, I don't know, just start a diet," he main focus of tape one, Michel says, was having the characters find a group of close friends who would accept them for who they were."That's where you can start to accept yourself even more," he says. "Because they are the reflection of who you are and if they like you, it means that you are likeable and you can love yourself." Olivia Lepore, who plays main character Swann Holloway, tells Newsbeat a lot of the game's themes - and her character's story - resonated with her."I think part of the reason I got this role is because we have so much in common," she says. "And I didn't feel like I had to put on a character playing her. I definitely just, in many ways, got to be myself."Olivia says that she's been blown away by the response from fans, who've identified with many of the themes and issues raised in the game."I have gotten some really beautiful messages from fans about how they feel like they connect with Swann," she says."I've been really touched by some of the messages to the point where it could be a bit overwhelming, because I just empathise so much with everybody's story." As for the conclusion of the story, Olivia says "expect the unexpected"."Wherever you think it's going. It's probably not," she says choices players made in part one will play out in the second, which is set to go to some darker places - and be much more dramatic."You can expect things to be, let's say, less happy and sunny and more gloomy than tape one."And we can't wait for you to open the box." Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
