Queen's Domain remembers what King's Field actually felt like — not the surface, the commitment.

You swung with the shoulder buttons. That's the thing I remember about King's Field — not the dungeon layouts, not the moon-slash trick you could cheese the whole game with, but the fact that the shoulder buttons decided whether your sword came down high or low, and if you guessed wrong, you ate the...

A documentary about the final days isn't a tribute — it's a coroner's report with a soundtrack.

The first time Sovereign talks on Virmire, I put the controller down. Not because the fight was hard — it wasn't, not really. Because a machine was explaining, patiently, that we weren't even ants to it, and the game had earned that line. Nobody had done that to me before. I was seventeen and I reme...

Ocarina of Time capped your wallet at 1,000 rupees on purpose. The secondhand market didn't get the memo.

The listing said "IN HAND — CONFIRMED — RARE FOIL VARIANT," three reassurances stacked on top of each other like the seller was worried I'd scroll past before the price landed. £749. Buy It Now. Free postage, which I assume is the joke. I want to be precise about what's in that listing. It isn't th...

Nintendo says remakes and new games both have a place. The word they picked means something specific, and it isn't 'shelf.'

Star Fox 64 opens over Corneria with a city sitting in the water, and if you clip a building your wing shears off and the Arwing starts pulling hard to the left. The original Star Fox, running on the Super FX chip, had the same premise, the same Arwing, the same Andross waiting at the end of it. Alm...

I haven't played Queen's Domain yet. I've played King's Field, and I know exactly what it's reaching for.

The first skeleton in King's Field doesn't run at you. It walks. It comes down the corridor at the speed of a man carrying something heavy, and that gives you time — plenty of time — to decide what to do. So you decide to swing. Your sword takes about a second and a half to come around. The skeleton...

A 96 is eighty-one people agreeing. The list underneath it is the actual story.

I read the score before I read a single word about the game. 96. Eighty-one critic reviews. Top of Metacritic's Best Games of 2026 list, and high enough on the all-time board that people are already screenshotting it next to the 1998 original — which I believe sits at a 99, and I'm quoting that from...

Nintendo cut fast travel from the remake, and the reason is that the original already had six of them — you just had to play a song to use one.

Run across Hyrule Field at night as a child and you'll hear the music change before you see anything. Then the ground cracks. Then the Stalchildren come up out of it, one after another, and you're a kid with a Deku Shield and a fairy yelling at you, and you have to decide whether to fight or sprint ...

EPD Production Group No. 3 made Ocarina, then spent two decades taking its rules apart. Now they're going back.

The first time I pressed Z and the camera snapped in behind Link's shoulder, I didn't know I was being taught anything. I thought I was fighting a Stalfos in the Forest Temple, and losing, badly, to a thing made of bones and bad intentions. That's the trick of Ocarina of Time. It taught you constan...

Miyamoto's line about generative AI is being read as reassurance. It's actually a job description.

Shigeru Miyamoto has spent about four decades measuring things. His own garden, which turned into Pikmin. His own bathroom scale, which turned into Wii Fit. The woods and caves around Sonobe, outside Kyoto, where he grew up — those turned into the first Zelda. A dog. A remote control sitting on a co...

Halloween weekend, and the scariest room I know is seventeen years old and has a bell in it.

You hear the bell before you see anything. That's the whole design. Tower of Latria, 3-1, Prison of Hope. The corridor is narrow. The light is a lantern on the end of a chain, swinging, and there's a shape coming around the corner that walks like it's carrying something heavy. The bell is the tell....

From a tethered kiosk controller in 1998 to whatever Switch 2 does next week, a count worth making.

The first time I saw the Ocarina of Time title screen I was standing in a shop, holding a controller tethered to a kiosk by a cable too short to stand comfortably, watching a horse gallop across a field to a piano. I didn't know you were supposed to catch her. I thought it was a cutscene that would ...

A composer wrote music for a game that will never exist, and it's the most complete thing that project left behind.

There's a stretch of the Journey soundtrack where a solo cello holds a note and the whole desert seems to lean toward it. Austin Wintory wrote that. If you've played Journey — and if you haven't, I'm not going to be the one who spoils the last ten minutes for you — you already know what that instrum...

A Kickstarter-funded GBA throwback that understands loss teaches better than accumulation.

There's a particular quiet that happens when a Metroidvania takes an ability back. You're standing in a corridor you crossed forty minutes ago and it's a wall now. Same room. Same tiles. Different you. Goodboy Galaxy does this on purpose, and it's the smartest thing about it. The genre's contract ...

A short stream tomorrow, a demo disc I still remember, and why the indie announcement still lands harder than the thirty-five-minute Direct ever does.

Fifteen minutes. Tomorrow Nintendo runs an Indie World showcase covering both Switch and Switch 2, and a quarter of an hour after it starts, it's over. I don't know the lineup. Neither do you, and anyone posting a leak tonight is guessing in public. What I know is the shape of these shows, and what...

Tribute is bolting a run-based mode onto Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and the loop it's borrowing was written in 2016 and drawn in 1963.

The first death is a fight. The second death is a habit. Somewhere around the ninth, Doctor Strange stops treating it as combat and starts treating it as data collection — this attack comes from the left, this one has a wind-up long enough to punish, this one you cannot block, you have to already be...

Redesigning a protagonist is the easiest feedback to action, and the easiest thing to get wrong twice.

There's a specific quiet that happens in a comment thread when a reveal trailer drops. Not outrage, exactly. More like a room full of people leaning forward at the same time and then, in unison, sitting back. That's what reportedly happened with Exodus — the sci-fi RPG that's spent a couple of year...

A sale list is a syllabus. You are not supposed to complete it.

The eShop page loads and it's sixty-one rows. Prices in euros, discount percentages in red, a little clock counting down to the first of November. You scroll. You scroll again. You've been on this page for eleven minutes, you've bought nothing, and that's the honest problem with a guide like this — ...

Eleven games landed this morning, and the one worth your ten dollars is a Barcelona arcade catalogue nobody's thought about since 1993.

Eleven games land on Xbox today. The one I keep coming back to is the one the announcement misspelled. Scroll the copy: *Galeco Sports Collection* in the body, `gaelco-sports-collection` in the URL. Somewhere between the writer's hands and the CMS, the name of a Barcelona arcade house that faded ou...

Nineteen years, one mandated engine, and a studio that rediscovered what it was making around year four of every project.

The Carta hideout in Dragon Age II is the same room. You enter from one side, you come back through it later from the other, and the walls are the same walls. Kirkwall is a city built out of four rooms and a staircase, and I say that with affection, because Dragon Age II is a game I have defended fo...