It's official: Resident Evil 9 is coming, and we just got our first real look at it during Summer Game Fest 2025.

Resident Evil Requiem is a single-player survival horror game due out February 27, 2026 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.

On-stage at SGF, host Geoff Keighley said Resident Evil Requiem marks a "bold shift for the franchise both in tone and gameplay." Expect "high-stakes cinematic action" on top of survival horror.

Check out the debut trailer below.

Capcom's official website for the game doesn't have much to add, but did point to "technological advancements" and "a story with rich characters and gameplay that's more immersive than ever before."

Here's the official blurb:

Requiem for the dead. Nightmare for the living.
Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth title in the mainline Resident Evil series.
Prepare to escape death in a heart-stopping experience that will chill you to your core.
A new era of survival horror begins in 2026. Technological advancements combined with the development team's depth of experience combine in a story with rich characters and gameplay that's more immersive than ever before.

We've known a new Resident Evil game was coming for a year now, with Capcom having teased the next game during its summer stream last July and then teased it yet again just last month while celebrating 10 million players of Resident Evil 4 Remake. That remake, which launched in 2023, was awarded a rare IGN 10/10, with our reviewer calling it "the series' most relentlessly exciting adventure rebuilt, refined, and realised to the full extent of its enormous potential."

If you need a catch up, check out everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.

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Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

If you enjoyed the Dying Light: The Beast gameplay that was just shown off at the Summer Game Fest Showcase, good news: we've got a LOT more! That starts with a 30-minute exclusive extended gameplay video (watch it above) as the kickoff to our all-June-long coverage of Dying Light: The Beast through our IGN First "cover story" editorial program.

Dying Light: The Beast is the upcoming new standalone entry in the first-person melee- and parkour-fueled zombie-fighting franchise, set in Castor Woods decades after the zombie outbreak that turned the world into...what you see on screen.

Keep checking back all June long for more exclusive IGN First coverage!

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Following last year’s genuinely excellent Batman: Arkham Shadow, Meta is moving from DC to Marvel for this year’s big superhero VR game effort with Deadpool VR, the just-announced first-person action romp due out exclusively for Meta Quest 3 and 3S in late 2025. I got a chance to swing by one of Meta’s Bay Area campuses last week to don one of the wireless headsets and become the Merc With a Mouth in a 30-minute hands-on session, and I learned several things I wasn’t expecting from the first Deadpool video game since Activision’s mediocre attempt in 2013.

1) Neil Patrick Harris voices Deadpool

Perhaps you had the same thought I did as you watched the announcement trailer: “Gee, that Ryan Reynolds soundalike sure sounds an awful lot like Neil Patrick Harris.” And sure enough, it in fact is NPH himself, whose snark we’ve seen weaponized on film time and again going all the way back to When Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The one-time Doogie Howser M.D. isn’t shy about letting the f-bombs fly as Deadpool, and assuming Reynolds’s price tag was too high, Harris sounds like a solid substitute.

2) It’s being developed by Twisted Pixel

If that name sounds familiar to longtime Xbox fans in particular, it’s because the studio made its name with a string of absolute banger Xbox Live Arcade games in the Xbox 360 days: The Maw, ‘Splosion Man, Ms. ‘Splosion Man, Comic Jumper, etc. It even made one of the few legitimately great Kinect games: The Gunstringer. After a fairly brief and uneventful period where they were acquired by Microsoft and subsequently parted ways with Microsoft, Twisted Pixel was picked up by Meta in 2021 after they made one of the best early-gen VR games: the black-and-white horror thriller Wilson’s Heart.

So what does all of this have to do with Deadpool VR? Simple: Twisted Pixel has a long track record of delivering good – and comedic – smaller-scale games, making them a potentially great fit for bringing the Merc With a Mouth to life in VR.

3) Marvel not only didn’t hold Twisted Pixel back, they encouraged more violence

There’s some give and take with Marvel when it comes to getting studio approval on the developer’s craziest ideas, admitted executive producer Jody Coglianese, but she told me that if they say no to anything it’s more about the character than any gameplay actions. But she said Marvel pushed Twisted Pixel more than the other way around, playing builds and then leaving feedback like, “What if holding your controller at a certain angle with one of your swords equipped enabled ‘x’ action?” And then the developer would put that new move into the game.

While IO Interactive stays hard at work on 007 First Light, the team made an appearance at Summer Game Fest 2025 to reveal another James Bond tribute that will see Hitman World of Assassination players taking out Mads Mikkelsen’s character from Casino Royale.

A trailer for the collaboration level was revealed today, showing Agent 47 as he heads to a new location to take out Le Chiffre, the iconic poker-playing villaint from 2006’s Casino Royale. This video game version of the character is even played by Mikkelsen himself, who returned to reprise his role as this latest Elusive Target, which is available right now.

You can take on an iconic 007 face in Hitman: World of Assassination starting today You can also see the new trailer below.

For more reveals, be sure to read up on everything else shown during Summer Game Fest 2025.

Developing…

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

This year's Summer Game Fest included the announcement of a brand new Wu-Tang Clan game from Brass Lion Entertainment: a cooperative action RPG called Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver.

Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver brings together up to four co-op players to fight...well, the titular Deceiver and save their home, Shaolin. The game meshes Afro-surrealism and anime, and has a soundtrack of both classic Wu-Tang songs and new music from DJ Just Blaze. Per a press release, this project was originally begun as a tie-in to upcoming horror film Angel of Dust from Wu-Tang members Ghostface Killah and RZA.

“Creating Angel of Dust has been an incredible journey," said Ghostface Killah in a statement. "Bringing the story to life through film was just the beginning. Now, with the development of the video game, we are immersing fans even deeper into this supernatural thriller universe. It’s about blending music, storytelling, and interactive experience. I can’t wait for fans to step into the darkness and discover what lies beneath.”

Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver will launch on PC and console at a later date. This is the second video game centered around the Wu-Tang Clan, following 1999 PlayStation fighting game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

If you’ve listened to your car radio at any point in the last decade, you’re almost certainly at least aware of the band Imagine Dragons. Best-known for hits like Radioactive, Demons, Believer, and Thunder, Imagine Dragons are among the best-selling and most decorated bands worldwide. Like them, love them, dislike them, whatever – just about everyone knows their music.

What they’re not known for is making video games. But band manager Mac Reynolds and his brother, lead singer Dan Reynolds, want that to change.

Back in 2020, the brothers founded Night Street Games, a new studio built to facilitate their other passion in life: game development. Speaking to Reynolds at the Game Developers Conference last March, he described making games as a “life long dream” that he and his brother have been quietly dabbling in for years now.

“Dan and I, we played a ton of games together [growing up]. And for us, I'm really dating myself now, but even in the Commodore 64 days all the way to Sierra. I was sneaking in the other room to call the Sierra helpline. And from there on, LucasArts and Delphine, where we would just wait for the next game. I remember playing Another World and Flashback came out and I needed to get it. And those games played a big part of our childhood and for me then, GoldenEye, that was a pivotal moment. So Dan and I, gaming was in our DNA. I even found this paper in my office just a couple months ago. Never remembered this at all. It was from third grade and it was like, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And it said, ‘I want to run a game studio.’”

Of course, the brothers ended up in music instead, but Reynolds says their passion for games continued. The two still played and discussed games regularly. Mac learned 3D modeling and animation, and Dan learned how to code. And as a band, Imagine Dragons have done a number of collaborations with major games over the years, from writing a song for Starfield to playing Zelda music at The Game Awards with composer Koji Kondo, from composing the opening theme for Arcane to underscoring the Nintendo Switch’s Superbowl commercial. Dan Reynolds has even published a small, experimental game already, on itch.io.

With that context in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising that Imagine Dragons’ founders might eventually try their hands at game development. And they’re not doing it alone. Night Street Games consists of roughly 25 people, including multiple Activision Blizzard veterans with experience on games such as Diablo 3, World of Warcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. And they’ve partnered with Ukrainian studio Argentics to make Last Flag, a third-person hero shooter that is centered around a game show-style rendition of Capture the Flag, inspired by Dan and Mac’s childhood memories:

“Dan and I, we used to play Capture the Flag in the woods at night as Boy Scouts and had great memories and very much enjoyed some of the various Capture the Flag game modes over the years from Quake to Unreal Tournament to Warsong Gulch to whatever,” Reynolds recalls. “And I reflected on the fact that none of those really got to that heart of what it meant to hide and to find, and the magic of being in nature and sneaking around and being a hero. When Capture the Flag is an afterthought or a game mode, it tends to really be predictable bases, predictable locations.

“And so we started with this theory of: what would a pure Capture the Flag game feel like? And quickly found a couple things, which is number one, hiding and finding is super fun. It makes the experience different every single time. But number two, there are some challenges to that unpredictability. And you need to have a very thoughtful structure to be able to make it feel more like poker and less like roulette where if you play your cards right, you really have a good shot at winning regardless of how lucky somebody gets in finding the flag. And so that developed into what is today a game where everything from the ground up, from the core game mechanics, to the level design, to the heroes and their abilities is all centered around how to have the best Capture the Flag experience.”

Like the game it’s based on, Last Flag is conceptually simple: two teams of five, each side has a flag that they hide somewhere on their side. When the game starts, each team must try and find the opponent’s flag and bring it back to their own base, then defend it for one minute to win the game, all while protecting their own flag. Last Flag throws in a few twists, such as towers around the map that can be captured in order to narrow down the flag’s location, and of course the unique abilities of each member of the roster of heroes, all of which can be upgraded throughout the match. There are 10 playable characters at launch, each with a unique kit: there’s an archer, a thief, a scout with a cyber falcon partner, and more.

“Part of the magic in discovery is learning how to play the heroes in unexpected ways,” Reynolds explains. “Then there's all these fun shareable moments that get created by people discovering new synergies between some of the abilities or discovering new ways to use them or looking at a situation that's completely novel and being like, ‘Oh crap, you know what I bet I could do?’ And to me, that's some of the most fun. You get some of that in games that we love. You get some of that in the wildness of Team Fortress 2 or the over-the-top games of Super Smash Bros. where you have those moments you want to talk about and clip and share. We hope to create a lot of those.”

Reynolds and his team have big plans for Last Flag long-term. The game’s frame story is that of a 1970s dystopian game show run by a mysterious media mogul, and Reynolds hints to me that there may be a grander story waiting to play out over time, perhaps with nods to he and his brother’s love of ARGs. There’s also plenty of room to add new elements: new characters, new stages, or even new gameplay elements. Reynolds does suggest that while exact pricing hasn’t been decided on yet, he expects Last Flag to be a one-time, premium purchase game as opposed to a free-to-play game with microtransactions.

Last Flag is planned for launch in 2026 on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and there’s a PC alpha planned later this year. When I ask Reynolds about a Nintendo Switch 2 release at GDC in March, he tells me he doesn’t have access to a dev kit just yet, but hopefully that’s changed by the time this piece publishes. Reynolds confirms the game is in development for console as well, so expect those other platform releases sometime later down the line. He and Night Street expect to be working on Last Flag for some time to come. He and his brother aren’t just musicians anymore, after all. They’re musicians and game developers.

“This is not a side project,” Reynolds says. “This is the next chapter of our lives.”

You can catch up on everything announced at Summer Game Fest right here, and stick with us for everything coming this weekend from IGN Live.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

A new Lego game has been announced at Summer Game Fest that looks suspiciously like Mario Party. And it's called? Lego Party! (Yes, with the exclamation point.)

Developed by SMG Studio, the Australian team behind Moving Out, this multiplayer party game includes 60 mini-games, hundreds of mini-figures and board games made out of Lego. Instead of Power Stars, you're competing with friends for Golden Bricks.

Announced at Summer Game Fest 2025, host Geoff Keighley claimed Lego Party! contained 1 million Lego bricks, 300 minifigures and over 700 trillion minifigure combinations. Which sounds like a lot.

A first-look trailer confirmed Lego Party! is coming to PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S later in 2025.

Lego Party is the second new Lego game announced today in quick succession. Just a few minutes ago we got our first look at Lego Voyagers, an adorable-looking co-op game for two players from Light Studio, the developer of Lego Builder's Journey.

Publisher by acclaimed indie publisher Annapurna Interactive, Voyagers offers a Split Fiction-style Friends Pass so two players can team up with just one copy of the game.

If you need a catch up on everything announced during tonight's show, here's everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Survival horror game ILL is showing signs of life...or death, as it were...in a new trailer at Summer Game Fest today.

The trailer gives us our first real, meaty look at the body horror gameplay of ILL, including its dismemberment mechanics. The game takes place in a research fort that keeps producing horrible Aberrations. Meanwhile, the player must save the thing that matters most to them, that's trapped deep inside.

Team Clout boasts that ILL will be a "realistic and terrifying experience" with "disturbingly realistic horrors", using gore, physics, and binaural audio to great effect.

ILL first appeared online in 2021 with intriguing concept trailer, but went relatively silent after that except for a few, brief signs of life. This is the first real, robust look we've gotten at the game from developer Team Clout at all, and a welcome sign for those interested in its unsettling vibes.

ILL is Team Clout's debut game, and comes into being thanks to the Mundfish Powerhouse initiative, an investment project from Atomic Heart developer Mundfish.

No release date yet for ILL, though you can wishlist it on Steam for now.

You can catch up on everything announced at Summer Game Fest right here, and stick with us for everything coming this weekend from IGN Live.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Wildgate, the space shooter from former Blizzard-led studio Moonshot Games and publisher Dreamhaven, will launch on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation on July 22 of this year.

This was announced today at Summer Game Fest, during which it was also revealed that there will be a cross-platform, open beta from June 9 through June 16 on all platforms. The beta will include two new characters, one with telekinesis (Kae) and the other with a jetpack (Adrian). Additionally, the beta will add three new explorable points of interest, new daily missions, a revamped mission system, and other improvements.

Wildgate was first announced back in March. It's a sci-fi multiplayer competitive shooter about a crew performing heists in space, with elements of both exploration and combat and a Sea of Thieves-like quality to the whole thing. We previewed it ahead of its announcement and our previewer said that it "will be one of those games where crazy things happen every single match that send me howling to my friends in victory or defeat, then swapping war stories with anyone who will listen the next morning, and if it manages to pull that off, it could very well be my next squad-based obsession."

We've chatted with Dreamhaven founder and former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime a few times now about his vision for the publisher. In March, alongside the announcement of Wildgate, he told us that he still hopes Dreamhaven can eventually be a beacon for the industry as he proclaimed he wanted it to be when the company first launched, but clarified his vision a bit:

“Really what I want to see happen is for Dreamhaven to build a reputation with gamers that the brand stands for something, a seal of quality, hopefully, that hopefully there's some trust that we've built up where players know that if a game is coming from Dreamhaven, regardless of genre, that it's going to be something very special and they'll want to have the curiosity to check it out.”

You can catch up on everything announced at Summer Game Fest right here, and stick with us for everything coming this weekend from IGN Live.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Techland showed up for Summer Game Fest 2025 to announce a Dying Light: The Beast release date of August 22, 2025, for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S.

The surprise puts the Dying Light spinoff out in just a few months, placing players back into the shoes of Kyle Crane following his absence in the 2022 sequel. It’s a release date announcement that comes with a fresh look at gameplay, as Techland teases some of the many, many ways players can beat, stab, and bash their way through hundreds of infected.

Dying Light: The Beast is a standalone story in Techland’s post-apocalyptic universe. It’s available for pre-order now, granting early purchasers access to exclusive items such as the Hero of Harran bundle. For more reveals, be sure to read up on everything else shown during Summer Game Fest 2025.

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Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

During Summer Game Fest today, Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree was announced from Bandai Namco. It's a new roguelike game made by developer Brownies that looks reminiscent of Hades, but derived instead from Eastern mysticism.

It's hard to piece together much about Towa just from the trailer, but from what we can tell it's a roguelike similar to Hades with a top-down view, action combat, and the ability to choose upgrades at certain junctures.

Towa appears to feature a cast of multiple characters to choose from who are all working together to fight some sort of demon bent on destroying the world, and you seem to be able to have multiple at once in the field fighting enemies. All the characters and the aesthetics of the world they inhabit are heavily steeped in classic Japanese art, and among the cast is what appears to be, delightfully, a giant shiba and a large talking koi.

You can catch up on everything announced at Summer Game Fest right here, and stick with us for everything coming this weekend from IGN Live.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Following the 2021 re-release of Ubisoft's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, the developers of TMNT: Shredder's Revenge are taking a crack at a brand new Scott Pilgrim game. It's called Scott Pilgrim EX, and it's coming to PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch in early 2026.

Scott Pilgrim EX is a brand new adventure made in collaboration with Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley. It's a four-player co-op brawler with a familiar retro look and a brand new story, where you can play as Scott, Ramona, and five other members of the cast as they fight demons, robots, and other enemies in a reimagined Toronto.

Appropriately, Scott Pilgrim EX will be backed by an all new soundtrack from Anamanaguchi, with art assisted by pixel artist Paul Robertson, and will be consulted on by Scott Pilgrim Takes Off director BenDavid Grabinski.

This will mark the second Scott Pilgrim game following Ubisoft's initial effort way, way back in 2010, not counting the 2021 remake for modern consoles. Tribute Games is a Montreal-based studio formed by former Ubisoft employees, and the team boasts a number of members who worked on the original.

If you need a catch up, check out everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

For those excited for developer Neowiz’s highly anticipated Overture add-on content, the wait is over: the Lies of P DLC is out right now.

The post-launch story content for Neowiz’s Pinocchio soulslike was shadow-dropped for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S during Summer Game Fest 2025 today. It means you can stop what you’re doing right now and go play it for yourself without the need to wait for a release date announcement. You can see what lies in store with the gameplay trailer below.

Lies of P: Overture is an exciting addition to Neowiz’s dark fantasy universe, but it’s surprise launch isn’t much of a surprise. The shadow-drop reveal actually leaked earlier today.

You can read our full Lies of P: Overture review here.For more reveals, be sure to read up on everything else shown during Summer Game Fest 2025.

Developing...

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Just announced at Summer Game Fest 2025, Lego Voyagers is an adorable-looking co-op game for two players from Light Studio, the developer of Lego Builder's Journey.

A soothing trailer showed two tiny brick characters — Red Brick and Blue Brick, as I'm calling them — work together to build, drive and sail through various Lego landscapes.

Lego Voyagers is set to launch sometime later in 2025 on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and offer a Split Fiction-style Friends Pass so two players can team up with just one copy of the game.

An accompanying press release describes the game as an adventure about friendship and play.

"When two friends make it their mission to rescue an abandoned spaceship, they embark on a journey beyond their wildest dreams, ultimately learning the value of being connected," the blurb reads. "Experience what it feels like to be a Lego brick. Tumble, jump, snap together, and build your way through rich brick worlds."

The whole thing looks like a Lego version of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but Lego, which to be honest sounds like fun.

If you need a catch up on everything announced during tonight's show, here's everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

If you’ve marion-yet to play the fantastic, Pinocchio-inspired soulslike Lies of P, then its first DLC expansion, Overture, is filled with finely polished reasons to do so. Though it's whittled from the same timber and sticks very closely to the original stage directions, this 12-hour encore has plenty of new (and still deeply depressing) areas to explore, some additional tools to carve baddies into kindling with, and more impressively menacing bosses to drop the curtain on. Plus, it does a great job fleshing out an already awesome story by tugging on a few strings that were left dangling in the base game and landing some surprising ventrilo-twists, renewing my appreciation for just how well this fib-filled tale made me care about its characters. I was happy to put my elongated nose back to the hack-and-slash grindstone of this top-puppet-tier soulslike, which left me more excited than ever for a proper sequel.

If you’re just joining us after the intermission, Lies of P is one of the better soulslikes to take the stage in a very crowded genre. Aside from its unique weapon-crafting system, it didn’t introduce many new ideas to shine a spotlight on, but the stuff it borrowed is all done extremely well. Overture doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken, adding a dozen hours of daunting challenges in the form of a time-traveling prequel that throws you back to the events preceding the main story. At roughly a third of the size of the original game, Overture feels pretty massive, following a similar (albeit at a much more modest scale) model as Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC by greatly expanding the amount of areas, bosses, and loot to collect. It does that while introducing an interesting second act to the story to boot, so there is enough meat on these wooden bones for me to remember how much I adored this devious adventure in the first place.

With a mostly new cast of characters, Overture could almost be enjoyed as a standalone adventure, were it not only accessible once you’re most of the way through the main story – plus it leans pretty heavily into existing lore, where a lot of the payoff requires you to know how it all ends. But still, as someone who hasn’t revisited Lies of P since launch, I didn’t feel at all lost, and Overture does a great job reintroducing you to the calamitous city of mechanical puppets and diseased creatures that is Krat. This new tall tale is every bit as heartbreaking and bleak as I’ve come to expect, with some interesting twists and turns that fill in existing gaps in unexpected ways and offer some very satisfying answers to questions I was left pondering over a year ago. It’s also got some of the most epic (and sometimes stomach-churning) moments I’ve seen in a game in a long time. I kinda forgot how full-anime this thing really goes at times, and that’s definitely a good thing in my book.

The main attractions in Overture, though, are the super weird new places you’ll visit and the evil monsters you’ll murder along the way. During one early section, you’ll walk through a zoo and get attacked by all manner of deranged animal, from apes to elephants to a giant alligator, while in another section you’ll run across a perilous lake of ice that falls apart under your feet while pirate-like puppets operate a cannon nearby in an attempt you to send you plunging into Davey Jones’ locker. There’s quite a bit of variety to this sandbox, and it’s especially cool to see the number of new enemies that have been added to the mix, like undead fish that leap out of the water and try to gobble you up while flopping about (this DLC really wants you to kill animals, if you couldn’t tell). That said, interesting new areas are also offset somewhat by curiously retread ground, including a carnival section that feels awfully familiar to the parade-themed spaces and enemies we’ve already seen before. There’s also plenty of rehashed enemies, like your standard psychotic humanoid puppets and undead dogs that have way more teeth than I’m comfortable with.

One of the standout parts of Overture is its new bosses, which are extremely original, mostly challenging, and serve as exciting climaxes after the slower lead-ups of slashing through chump minions and reading private documents you find lying around, you nosey little mannequin. I’ll avoid spoiling as many as I can, but there’s a good mix of absolutely massive, ugly monsters wielding such enormous weapons that it’s completely insane you can parry them with your tiny sword, and fast-moving humanoid enemies who dodge around and cross blades with you in a contest of reflexes and pattern recognition. The final boss in particular, who has some of the most hilariously convoluted attacks Lies of P has ever concocted, is especially fun to learn, and provided a satisfying conclusion and final skill check that made me feel like I’d really earned that ending. None of these encounters were as difficult as I remember some of the hardest fights in the base game being, but that’s partially because they were better balanced in general, so I had more fun dying and learning their ins and outs with better consistency. It’s also possible I’ve just gotten better at soulslikes since I’ve reviewed about 50 of them in the past few years, from Lords of the Fallen to Another Crab’s Treasure, but I definitely enjoyed what felt like a more predictable level of challenge all around.

Though there’s plenty of cool new sights to see and things to kill in Overture, not much at all has changed with the actual moment-to-moment gameplay. There are at least a handful of interesting new weapons to use, like some deadly hand claws that are a great option for dexterity-focused builds, as well as some new amulets to augment your build with, but nothing that’s outside of what you’d expect to find in the base game. And when it comes to things like actual combat strategy or exploration, this add-on is largely just more Lies of P – that’s definitely a good thing, but it does mean I still have all the same criticisms as before. The sections that lead up to each boss fight are still significantly easier than those eventual encounters, and the stiff combat system locks you into a pretty specific Bloodborne-like playstyle compared to the RPG-inspired nature of other soulslikes that give you more freedom.

It’s not a huge deal that these issues haven’t really been ironed out, but what is a little disappointing is how Overture plays it fairly safe when it comes to new mechanics. It only introduces one in the form of a fresh upgrade tree system that lets you further improve and customize passive benefits, some of which increase the damage you deal or make you more likely to survive a barrage of attacks from a boss. This system is certainly neat, but it mostly feels like an extension of the existing upgrade system that just adds more runway to leveling up, and there aren’t any major shakeups to the sorts of things you’ll be doing as you butcher your way through Krat, so it’s a good thing doing so is as fun as ever.

Embark Studios reappeared at Summer Game Fest 2025 to announce an Arc Raiders release date of October 30, 2025, for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S.

The release date was revealed alongside a new trailer today. The highly anticipated follow-up project to Embark’s The Finals will take a different route than fans of the developer may be used to. Instead of dropping players into a competitive, high-stakes FPS game show, Arc Raiders is a free-to-play, multiplayer extraction adventure game set in a sci-fi version of Earth that takes place far in the future.

More details about Arc Raider’s full launch will be revealed closer to its October release date. For more, be sure to read up on everything else shown during Summer Game Fest 2025. You can also click here to read our preview.

Developing…

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).