Category: Games

Streaming giant Netflix has confirmed in a shareholders letter that it’s not only expanding into games but also won’t charge users extra to play them.

Netflix said it plans to build on the company’s earlier efforts around “interactivity.” Think things like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or the Stranger Things line of games. In doing so, the offering of titles Netflix adds to its service will come at “no additional cost [to users] similar to films and series.” However, the company said these games will only be available on mobile devices for now.

“We’re also in the early stages of further expanding into games, building on our earlier efforts around interactivity (eg. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) and our Stranger Things games,” Netflix said. “We view gaming as another new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation, and unscripted TV. Games will be included in members’ Netflix subscription at no additional cost similar to films and series. Initially, we’ll be primarily focused on games for mobile devices.”

Later, Netflix reiterated its excitement for the movies and TV shows its currently and planning to offer. However, the company is now looking to diversify its portfolio after 10 years on the market.

“We’re excited as ever about our movies and TV series offering and we expect a long runway of increasing investment and growth across all of our existing content categories, but since we are nearly a decade into our push into original programming, we think the time is right to learn more about how our members value games,” the company concluded.

News of Netflix’s interest in video games sparked after reports circulated this past May. The company hired former Electronic Arts and Zynga executive Mike Verdu not long after, fueling speculation of how Netflix would adapt itself to expand into the games industry. Reports also suggested that the company wouldn’t charge subscribers extra to play games through its service.

The company is no stranger to video games and not simply because of Bandersnatch of the Stranger Things games. Netflix has created series around a plethora of game IPs and recently held the first-ever WitcherCon, which announced in-development shows based off the franchise.

Though Netflix is known as a streaming service with obvious competitors in platforms like Disney+ and the like, the company actually finds social media sites like TikTok and live-service titles such as Fortnite to be the real competition. Despite this, Netflix reported that 209 million people subscribe to the service now. The company also revealed its most-watched programs during the Q2 2021 period.

We went back to every film that Black Widow starred or co-starred in, and counted every time that she did “The Pose.”

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

After each of the challenging, climatic boss fights in Death’s Door, you’re forced to sit through a brief eulogy for the foe you’ve just slain. Sombre music plays as a gravedigger arrives to fulfill his duty, summerizing your enemy’s actions–good and bad–while also throwing in a joke or two for levity. Death’s Door doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it always finds interesting ways to make a point about the unending cycle of life and death, the pursuit of a means to unbalance that cycle, and ultimately the consequences of those actions. It’s a consistently entertaining action-adventure game with an eye-catching art style and engrossing combat, all which elevate its distinct setting into something special.

Playing as a fledgling of a commission of crows, you’re duty-bound to reclaiming the souls of those that are meant to pass onto the next life. Aided by doors that can transport you to lands near and far, you can hop between locales rapidly as you reap souls. The catch is that every crow needs to complete its task in order to halt the flow of their own life, with incomplete missions forcing you to experience that natural flow of time. When one such assignment goes poorly and your target’s soul is stolen, you’ll need to aid an old crow into opening a large, ominous door to reclaim your lost soul and, in turn, continue to live indefinitely.

Death’s Door starts strong with its introduction to the commissions, with its bleak black-and-white presentation fitting in with a strong noir theme. Colors stand out in these bureaucratic offices, with the warm glow of your weapons and the searing brightness of sparse neon signs creating a striking contrast. The rest of Death’s Door’s worlds are far more colorful but all distinct in their own ways–the dreary, muted colors of the game’s opening cemetery transform into a lush, green forest with a damp and dark temple, while the snowy white peaks of the northern mountain regions offer another opportunity for piercing bright colors from your attacks to shine through. The isometric angle of the game’s camera doesn’t limit your ability to soak in the artistic beauty of Death’s Door, which consistently had me stopping to take in the atmosphere of each new area.

Enemies are peppered throughout each of these worlds, giving you numerous opportunities to engage with Death’s Door’s simple-yet satisfying combat. You only have access to a single weapon at a time, with each one you find offering its own range, combo count, damage, and unique ability. Your starting sword is great for whacking out short three-hit combos, while lighter daggers offer less damage output but a better chance to get more hits in without needing to take a break. Attacks aren’t limited by stamina, instead simply taking a different amount of time to execute depending on their animation. It can take some time to get used to the pauses you have to take after each attack, and the lengthier ones after each combo will punish you for overextending yourself. However, these demands make combat feel purposeful–each hit you initiate needs to finish, and enemies are designed with this in mind. They routinely take one more hit to kill than you might expect, encouraging you to play around with spacing offered by your dodge. Death’s Door doesn’t feel punishing by any stretch, but it’s also a game that plays by a set of rules that don’t always allow you to feel invincible.

Death’s Door is a fairly linear adventure game, limiting your movement through its handful of hubs by the current abilities you have. Each new boss requires a new ability to reach, corresponding with the mechanics you’ll need to overcome in the eventual fight. These abilities are regularly fun to use, too, starting with a simple bow and arrow and eventually giving way to a fireball spell (which is fired with a very hadoken-looking animation), extremely useful bombs, and a satisfying hookshot that can reel you into new areas and enemies alike. Each of these abilities can be upgraded, too, should you find each of the associated challenges out in the world. They’re not required, but they can radically alter how you use each one in combat. The hookshot, for example, can be upgraded to include a deadly attack when used against enemies, letting you reel yourself in and fire off a powerful strike as soon as you connect.

Gallery

These abilities are mostly used to give you access to new areas (bombs let you blow up cracked walls, and the hookshot gives you access to new platforms as examples) but learning to combine them into your repertoire of standard attacks makes combat exhilarating. This is especially true when you’re consistently faced by a growing roster of enemies, each of which changes the ways in which you need to engage them. Some are incredibly agile, such as hunched-over beasts that can jump around you while throwing boomerangs in your direction. Others are slower but tougher to take down, such as armored knights with shields that take a couple of solid hits to finally beat. Death’s Door is at its best when it’s throwing you into combat arenas that pull from the entire roster, challenging you to get hits in where you can while also keenly identifying which enemies to take out first. It plays out like a deadly dance of dexterous dodges and opportunistic swings of the sword, giving skirmishes an elegant rhythm that’s consistently fun to fight in tune with.

Each of the hubs that you visit in Death’s Door is visually distinct and eye-catching, but its layouts are just as engaging to uncover as you explore. Each one is segmented into small sections that eventually lead to shortcuts that loop back around to the start, acting as ways to quickly get back to where you were after an untimely death. There’s a tangible feeling of relief each time you open a gate or generate a ladder that lets you cut out a challenging section, coupled with the intriguing discovery of how the entire hub you’re in folds in on itself in a clever way.

Death’s Door doesn’t feel punishing by any stretch, but it’s also a game that plays by a set of rules that don’t always allow you to feel invincible.

Understanding the layout of each level also lets you tactically plant seeds in special pots laid around, which offer the only way to regain health. Since the seeds for these are limited (and sometimes hard to find) laying out your own route for healing and identifying which sections you can risk it blends in well with how hubs have intricate layouts for you to learn, making your understanding of each route as crucial as your ability to deal with the enemies contained within them.

Although there is a very clear main path, all of Death’s Door’s hubs have numerous optional secrets for you to uncover, especially during return visits with new abilities. The standard types are there–for example, shrines that you can pray to to increase your health and magic pools, the latter of which you pull from to use your abilities–while others are optional boss fights that will upgrade your abilities. Some weapons are also only found outside of the main path, which can drastically affect your overall playstyle should you choose to seek them out or not.

Death’s Door can be challenging if you don’t take a break from its main path, especially if you find yourself struggling with the initial health pool you have. Without revisiting areas or going out of your way to look for obscure paths hidden by the game’s fixed camera view, you can quickly find yourself wishing for the ability to take one more hit during hard fights. It’s not impossible to complete the main story without this, but the adventure certainly feels tuned towards these small breaks, which can slow down the pacing in an irritating manner.

Gallery

All these secrets are still present once credits have rolled, as well as an entirely new one that lets you explore all the game’s hubs at a new time of day. This opens previously inaccessible areas and presents new combat challenges for you to undertake, giving Death’s Door a long tail after its main narrative is complete. There are areas and doors that cannot be opened without a thorough comb through of areas you might already be familiar with, revealing some hidden depth to each area that lets you appreciate its design in a new way. It can be frustrating to have to relearn the structures of some dungeons again after some time away, and the omission of an in-game map doesn’t let you quickly brush up on these areas. Despite that, if you’ve found yourself enamored with the game’s balance of exploration and combat, the additional content and draw of uncovering all that is there is a welcome addition.

With an engaging world to explore and consistently satisfying combat to keep things entertaining, it’s easy to fall in love with Death’s Door. Its premise hooks you immediately, and it has the style and the substance to maintain the captivating allure of its opening. Perhaps most importantly, it’s just consistently fun to play, with sharp enemy designs that keep you on your feet to challenging boss fights that test your skills in satisfying ways. There’s a lot of death to deal and souls to reap, but Death’s Door makes it a delight every step of the way.

In 2018, Alicia Vikander became the second actor to take up the mantle of Lara Croft in a reboot of the Tomb Raider film franchise, and since then news of a sequel has been swirling. Most recently, Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green was tapped to both write and direct.

However, thanks to the delays of the pandemic causing chaos in the entertainment industry, Vikander has yet to see a script. During a conversation with GameSpot about her upcoming film, The Green Knight, Vikander opened up about the status of the project.

“I would love to return to Lara again. After this last year, you know, everything had to be put on hold. But now that the world is starting to get up and running again, I know that Misha [Green] has just started and there will be a script coming in at some point. I’m really looking forward to reading it.”

The road to production for Tomb Raider 2 has been a long one. Prior to Green’s attachment to the project, writer Amy Jump had been tapped to pen the sequel alongside director Ben Wheatley with a tentative release date of spring 2021. However, after the pandemic put a near industry-wide halt on filming, things were once again forced back up in the air. Green was signed on to replace both Jump and Wheatley in January of 2021.

Green has since tweeted that drafts of the script are in progress under the working title Tomb Raider: Obsidian.

With any luck, a future draft of the script will end up in Vikander’s hands.

Vikander’s latest project, The Green Knight, is an action-adventure film examining the medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where she plays not one but two roles beside her co-star Dev Patel. The movie finally hits theaters after a year-long delay on July 30.

Tetsuya Nomura holds many titles at Square Enix and has had pivotal roles in the creation of Kingdom Hearts and several iconic entries in the Final Fantasy franchise; he’s a household name among those who follow Japanese games. He has also established instantly recognizable character designs over the years–gratuitous use of fashionable belts and zippers aside, fans of Square Enix games know Nomura’s influence when they see it. However, with the upcoming NEO: The World Ends With You (henceforth referred to as NEO TWEWY), a different generation of character designers have left their creative mark alongside Nomura in this game, supporting what he set in motion with the original game from 2007.

I had an opportunity to talk specifically about the development of NEO TWEWY’s character designs with those who led its development: Gen Kobayashi and Miki Yamashita, in addition to Tetsuya Nomura. With extravagant style and fashion at the forefront of NEO TWEWY’s expressive, youthful attitude, our brief conversation centered around keeping up with trends, reflecting the real world in their designs, and how creating characters has changed but also stayed the same over the years.

NEO: The World Ends With You is set to launch soon on July 27 for PlayStation 4 (playable on PS5) and Nintendo Switch, and a PC version is planned for release sometime this summer. For more on the game, you can read up on our NEO TWEWY gameplay impressions, our previous interview with Nomura and company on NEO TWEWY, or check out the game yourself with the demo available on PS4 and Switch.

The following interview was conducted through a video call with an interpreter from Square Enix who translated the questions and answers between Japanese and English. This was also edited for clarity and readability.

How do you keep up with trends and find inspiration and stay youthful? Since this is a game where it’s mostly young folks living in a modern world, how do you make sure that you’re portraying them accurately or creating something that players can identify with?

Nomura: I actually live very close to Shibuya, so it’s actually within the vicinity of where I would actually be on a daily basis. I didn’t really have to buckle down and go out to Shibuya to do extensive research. It was essentially part of my daily life. And then, as for looking at more newer fashion, I did look to social media and fashion model accounts for people in their teens to get an idea of what the latest trends were because they know best. I got ideas of what kind of things were most important in the current fashion. So I really utilized social media a lot.

Kobayashi: I’m not really the type of person to follow the latest fashion trends. When this project initially started, I kind of scrambled, went to Shibuya to look at their various stores and check the latest sorts of trends. Also, I did a lot of research online to take in as much knowledge as possible. But when I actually got down to creating designs, it really didn’t go well at first. There was a lot of advice that I ended up getting from Nomura-san, he did give me a lot of pointers, you should take a look at this. Through his guidance, I was able to cross the finish line and finish up these designs.

Yamashita: I tend to do a lot of my research online, so I would look up what kinds of trends there are for the modern age and among young Japanese people. What kind of trends, brands, or Japanese brands are setting, too. Those are some points that I looked into. I also referenced overseas high fashion brands to make sure that we weren’t veering too far away from the worldwide trends as well. So, that is something that I try to incorporate into my designs.

Gallery

How has the team evolved in terms of designing female characters that are more representative of fashion in the real world? I’ve been playing the game and have also been seeing some non-gender specific styles of fashion as well. How has the team modernized how they design characters that aren’t always dressed traditionally male or female?

I’ve noticed some really stark design decisions for Nagi and Kanon for example, but also for characters like Kaie, who I didn’t want to assume how they identified, but really stood out through their style. I’m seeing a lot more variety in expression between non-gender specific styles and female characters, and that stood out to me.

Nomura: I wasn’t really overly conscious of the current kind of conversation that’s being had relating to those issues. I designed as I had done in the past as well. But some of the characters that you had mentioned were designed by Yamashita-san, and with the fact that we had a new female designer on the team this time around, that might have changed things around. So I think Yamashita-san can speak on this point.

Yamashita: Regarding the second part of your question, I think one of the characters you were referring to is Eiru, who is kind of non-gender specific. This is a character that I designed at the very end. When we look at the original TWEWY, we had Rhyme, who is also kind of non-gender specific or somewhere in the middle. We thought it might be a good idea to have a similar character in the mix as well for this game. I went back to the planner and was able to put this character into the mix at the very last moment.

I think what we’re seeing in the current age where people are living their lives, we’re not specifically confined to one gender or the other, which is what we’re seeing more. I wanted to incorporate that into the design for this character. That is one point. Then, as for the female characters, Nagi and Kanon, what I really focused on was trying to make sure that their personalities really shone through each of their designs. That is something that I was most conscious about.

As for Nagi, I actually don’t think anybody in real life really dresses this way, but I wanted to make sure that her inner characteristics were shown in her design and that her fashion was brought to the forefront. I think I was able to achieve that. The current sort of temperature that we’re seeing or the sentiment with female characters, that is something I didn’t really have to consider for her specifically.

As for Kanon, she’s the character that Fret [one of the core characters in the main party] falls in love with at first sight. I wanted to make sure that that was incorporated into her design as well, making her a beautiful, more mature lady that would catch the eye of the people. I tried to give her pants that aren’t exactly tapered, not skinny, but wider at the seam, which I feel is something that is fashionable amongst women in the current age. So, I wanted to use that as something modern in her design.

Yamashita-san, you’ve worked on several Kingdom Hearts games. Throughout those years, what’s something you’ve identified in character design you’ve really wanted to impact? Then, maybe you were able to with NEO TWEWY or still want to change or impact in the realm of character design?

Yamashita: Difficult question, but to answer, the foundation of the approach that I have is that I want to provide character designs that players really enjoy and like. That is the basis. Then, in terms of what I tried to accomplish this time around, is to let the characters wear what they want. Essentially, freedom or liberty in terms of what kind of design and fashion to incorporate into these characters.

Nomura-san, you’ve been doing this for a very long time–what are some of the biggest things that you’ve learned over the years in either designing so many characters and overseeing other people’s designs?

Nomura: Looking back at past games, let’s say, I would have just handled all the character designs myself. But more recently, for a lot of games, there have been more characters in the games themselves, a lot more character designs that need to be done, and more designs that are required. This is not just limited to NEO TWEWY, but more recently, we have multiple character designers taking care of one game. We’re seeing more and more of those games where we’re having multiple designers work on them and collaborating. But when we’re looking at NEO TWEWY in particular, we each took care of one of the characters in the main party.

This was a first for us where we had different people take care of the main characters in the game. Through this, they came up with various ideas that I would never have thought of myself. It’s great that different personalities are coming out of these characters. In a way, it feels more natural that we’re having different people with different ideas, creating different characters for this game. Whereas before, it was one person, me, taking care of or creating different characters. Then, also with Yamashita joining the team this time around, we also have a female perspective on the team, which was also a great addition. For me, this is a great kind of progress or direction that we’re going in.

Also, from a workload perspective, it’s nice that people are carrying the workload with me now. It’s a lot better for me. I do kind of oversee the character design as a whole, but what we’re actually seeing on the screen in terms of characters, that is overseen and handled by Kobayashi. So, it’s great that he’s able to handle that [taking] more workload off my shoulders. And it’s great [overall] to have multiple people where we can actually split the work amongst us.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Actor Victoria Cartagena will be joining Season 3 of Batwoman, according to Deadline. Cartagena will take on the recurring role of Renee Montoya, the former Gotham City police officer, which she previously played in the Fox series Gotham.

Deadline describes Batwoman’s version of the character as someone who “left the force when she could no longer stomach the corruption inside the department.” Montoya is still trying to work within the system, running the “‘freaks division,’ which hasn’t seen a lot of action… until now. Righteous and pragmatic, and LGBTQ+, she’s a woman with a very personal (and mysterious) mission to help clean the streets of Gotham in the right way, by whatever means necessary.”

It was also recently announced that Riverdale’s Robin Givens is set to appear in Batwoman as Jada Jet, a new character created for the DC show. According to a previously released character synopsis, Jet is “a woman who has worked her way through life’s ups and downs to climb her way to the top–all while being extremely protective over her impetuous son. A woman with a deep past that forced her to give up her first-born child, Jada is a woman with a good heart, but will do whatever it takes to protect her family.”

Batwoman Season 3 premieres on The CW on October 13, with Javicia Leslie in the title role. Her character, Ryan Wilder, is the show’s second Batwoman, with Ruby Rose having played Kate Kane in Season 1. The show will screen back-to-back with DC’s Legends of Tomorrow each week, which is about to start its seventh season. The Flash also returns to The CW this fall, with Season 8 premiering on November 16.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.