The PlayStation 5 represents a pretty bold design choice, with a curved space-age design and white fins along the sides. Fans have naturally assumed that an all-black model would be coming, matching the look of the last few PlayStation consoles, but Sony hasn’t introduced one so far. A third-party is offering custom systems this week that do just that, but they’re extremely limited in supply.
The store SUP3R5 is selling black consoles inspired by the design of the PS2. That means the white parts of the console and DualSense controller have been converted to black, and it sports retro coloring with the old PlayStation logo and the colors on the face buttons. The custom consoles are set to go on sale this Friday, January 8, at 3 PM ET. They’re expected to ship in the late spring.
It looks pretty slick, but you’ll have to snag one quickly. The store has only produced 304 of the custom consoles, which will make them considerably harder to come by than even a standard retail PS5–which is already notoriously difficult to find. The console package includes a black DualSense controller, but custom controllers are also available to purchase separately with about 500 available. Sony has teased further DualSense controller color options will come, at some point.
If you’re lucky enough to snag one, you’ll also be paying extra for the aesthetic satisfaction. The consoles are priced at $650 and $750 for the All-Digital and standard edition, respectively, a sharp increase from the $400 and $500 regular cost. The a la carte DualSense controllers are similarly pricey, at $100 up from $70.
And as always with custom hardware, there is the possibility that any of these modifications could void the warranty or lead to other unexpected issues, so buyer beware.
If you just want a regular old vanilla PS5, keep an eye on our PS5 restock guide. We’re regularly updating as retailers add more supply, but it tends to go fast.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign, years of development, and multiple delays, Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 is finally slated for release this year.
Double Fine boss Tim Schafer recently gave an update on the project, stressing that the game is indeed on track to launch in 2021. All the levels are in the game and no more features are being added, so the team is now working on getting the game polished and ready to release.
Schafer went on to say that Double Fine is refusing to crunch on Psychonauts 2 as it enters its final stage of development. The period of crunch on the first Psychonauts was brutal, Schafer said, and with that in mind, the studio is unwilling to do that again.
Reflecting on the crunch for 2005’s Psychonauts, Schafer said, “You’re just so focused on making the game good, and getting it done, and then you look up and it’s a sea of dead bodies all around you. And you’re like, ‘What have I done?'”
For Psychonauts 2, Schafer said it is very tempting right now to crunch on the game to get it out the door, but he won’t do that. “If you can’t move the money, and you can’t move the schedule, and you can’t move the quality of the game, you can just move the quality of everyone’s life down a lot by making them come in and work at a lot,” Schafer said.
Microsoft acquired Double Fine during Psychonauts 2’s development. Despite that, the game continue will still release on all previously announced platforms, including ones that rival Microsoft’s. People on Xbox and PC, however, are getting special treatment because they can get the game at no extra cost through Game Pass.
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Cyberpunk 2077 has set a number of impressive sales feats since it launched last year, such as selling 13 million copies at launch and breaking records on Steam for the most concurrent users ever in a single-player game. Cyberpunk 2077 also has several other achievements that CD Projekt Red likely doesn’t want to celebrate, such as Sony and Microsoft offering full refunds to customers due to multiple performance issues within the game, with Sony even going so far as to pull the game from the PlayStation Store.
Better optimized on PC than on console, Cyberpunk 2077 has had a more positive reception on that platform but has failed to maintain its playerbase since launch. Cyberpunk 2077 has lost 79% of its players since launch according to GitHyp’s data, with its current peak being over 200,000 players in comparison to its December peak of over a million players.
By contrast, it took CD Projekt Red’s previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, three months to lose that percentage. However, The Witcher 3 started from a much lower peak of around 92,000 at launch in 2015.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a long road ahead of it before it’s as universally loved as CDPR’s Witcher series. Staff haven’t held back from questioning the founders and upper management about crunch and the game’s marketing and a class-action lawsuit alleging that the studio hid the poor quality of the game on last-gen consoles is underway.
In more positive Cyberpunk 2077 news, you’re now able to play the game in third-person view on PC with a few handy mods.
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Microsoft has revealed the first new batch of Xbox Game Pass titles being added to the catalog this month, and there are some great games coming.
New additions for January 2021 include the fighting game Injustice 2 (January 7), along with Giant Sparrow’s acclaimed What Remains of Edith Finch (January 14) for PC. That game is already included with Xbox Game Pass on console.
Also coming to Game Pass in January is the PES 2021 Season Update for console and Android (January 7), which is an updated version of PES 2020 with new rosters. Game Pass subscribers can also look forward to the dungeon-crawler Torchlight III (January 14) and the 1950s-set adventure game The Little Acre (January 7).
Additionally, Microsoft reminded users that they have until January 25 to take advantage of the introductory Game Pass offer where you can get 3 months for only $1.
The Medium reminds me of Alan Wake, if Wake leaned a bit harder into its horror side. Bloober Team’s upcoming Xbox Series X and S exclusive – that’s right, it’s not coming to Xbox One when it gets released on January 28, which I’ll explain shortly – thoroughly impressed me in a 20-minute demo that skipped around to a few different areas. It’s moody, it’s cinematic, and like any good horror game, it’s got a creepy little girl that sends shivers down your spine. And it’s literally two games running at the same time.
The two worlds thing is why The Medium is a next-gen Xbox exclusive: it’s running two game worlds at once – protagonist Marianne’s real world and the sinister spirit world that she can see and do unique things in. The screen literally splits horizontally at times while you navigate both worlds at the same time, and the lead designer told me that, quite simply, running two worlds simultaneously just doesn’t work on current-gen from a technical perspective.
The result is a unique gameplay experience, and one that’s guaranteed to have some variety in it. My demo began a chunk of the way into the campaign, in which Marianne enters the abandoned and decrepit old Hotel Niwa looking for a man named Thomas for reasons I didn’t have context for in this demo. She examines an open suitcase on the ground. Inside is a men’s dress shoe, and when examining it she hears screams – voices from the past, Bloober Team said. But that’s just a warmup.
Later, a kid’s ball bounces down the stairs behind you, and that’s when you meet Sadness, the aforementioned creepy little girl. She’s missing an arm and has a mask on her face, and the spirit world has clearly not been kind to her. She just wants to play, but Marianne asks her to help find Thomas first. That requires a trip upstairs, which Sadness can do in the spirit world, but Marianne can’t in the real world due to the steps being gone.
While I wouldn’t call the next bit a puzzle sequence, per se, it is a situation that needs solving. You need to power up the elevator, and that means triggering an out of body experience so that you can solely occupy the spirit world. You can only do that for a short amount of time before your body literally disintegrates, however, but once you’ve absorbed some spirit energy, you can come back to your body, blast that energy into the fuse box, and continue upwards.
In another section of the hotel, you’re trapped on the other side of a mirror, and you need a key; something related to a cat. That leads to the faceless lost soul who cannot rest. His name is Bernard, and you’ll need to say his name and restore his face to allow him to leave his purgatory. Naturally, his face is in a room swarming with moths, but another spirit energy charge can burn the bugs and clear the path. Face restored, soul at rest, and that reveals the cat toy needed to escape this mirror realm.
Finally, I saw an encounter with an invisible, seemingly winged monster that seemed to feed on your fear. This was the most Alan Wake-like moment I witnessed, thanks to the flashlight on Marianne’s chest that blinks faster as the creature gets closer. You’ll have to hold your breath and hide from the beast, both as you try to escape an indoor confrontation and later as it blocks your way in an outdoor area.
If the rest of the game is anything like my demo, The Medium will be oozing with tension and atmosphere, and hopefully a bit more challenging puzzle-solving. To that end, the developers say you’ll spend about a third of the campaign each in the real world, the spirit world, and the split-screen dual-world scenario. And remember that the Xbox Series also has Scorn lined up as a 2021 exclusive horror game, so here’s hoping The Medium gets the Xbox’s year off to a spooky start.
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
Developer Bloober Team has been steadily honing its craft for compelling psychological horror games since the release of 2016’s Layers of Fear. The studio followed up this release with the remarkable cyberpunk horror game Observer in 2017, and then both Layers of Fear 2 and a survival horror game set in the Blair Witch franchise in 2019. While these games were cut from a similar cloth of first-person atmospheric horror, Bloober Team’s next game, The Medium, is a more cinematic turn for the developer–one that has been in the works since 2013. Releasing on PC and Xbox Series X|S as a console exclusive on January 28, The Medium is a story-driven horror experience that tells its narrative across twin parallel realities that come together in a bizarre yet still alluring fashion.
We recently had the chance to get an early look at The Medium ahead of its release and spoke with producer Jacek Zieba and lead game designer Wojciech Piejko about Bloober Team’s long-gestating project. In The Medium, you play as Marianne, a psychic who has a powerful connection to the spirit world that acts as a dark mirror to our own. After learning about a tragic murder at a now-abandoned hotel, she travels to the derelict site to uncover dark secrets that reveal the truth of what happened and how her own supernatural powers are involved in the overarching mystery.
Moving away from the first-person perspective of Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, The Medium is a third-person game that uses a combination of fixed camera angles akin to survival horror classics. The game also incorporates split-screen gameplay mechanics to show off Marianne’s exploration of the real world and the spirit realm. While exploring, Marianne can use her powers to interact with normal objects to uncover past connections with the long-deceased. While it looks to be a major departure from what Bloober Team has worked on, The Medium still retains that same sense of isolation and tense horror, focusing on a lone protagonist using their wits and quick-thinking to solve puzzles and overcome foes.
From my first impressions of the game in action, The Medium shares a remarkably similar vibe to Konami’s Silent Hill series, particularly in its handling of atmospheric horror within mundane locations. The game’s musical score is even co-composed by Akira Yamaoka, who was a composer for most of the music in the Silent Hill series. This is actually all intentional, as it turns out. According to the developers, the Silent Hills series was a significant source of inspiration for The Medium’s creators, and according to them, the game is a tribute to the franchise.
“The Silent Hill series, particularly the second game, is our inspiration. Not just for The Medium, but for our company and how we create horror games. With The Medium, we see it as a love letter to the series and to Silent Hill 2,” said producer Jacek Zieba.
Lead game designer Wojciech Piejko chimed in to elaborate further. “We are fans of the Japanese horror games like Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, and Forbidden Sirens. In my opinion, those are the best ones. To continue on with what Jacek said, we admire the Silent Hill series for how it doesn’t quite judge you for your choices in the game, and that’s something we try to present in our games. Like in Silent Hill 2, the game never judges you or explains clearly whether you made bad or good choices. That approach really resonates with us, and we applied that to the design of our games at Bloober. Layers of Fear, Observer, they are built with the same idea.”
While the devs aren’t shy about sharing their influences, The Medium goes beyond just being a homage. One of the game’s more novel aspects is its approach to presenting both the real and spirit worlds at once. Instead of traveling between one or the other, The Medium shifts to a dual-screen view of both realms, with you being able to control Marianne across the two worlds simultaneously. Essentially, you’re controlling two characters at the same time, exploring environments similar in layout but drastically different in aesthetic and atmosphere. For example, the real world’s interpretation of the hotel is something akin to a haunted house, but it’s a decaying vision of hell in the spirit world.
Stylistically these two realms have many differences. However, they are still connected, and actions in one area can have influences in the other. Marianne takes on a supernatural appearance in the spirit world, and she’ll even interact with characters that can only be seen from that realm. The 24-style technique of the split-screen makes exploration, and even its narrative moments, feel more active, which gives it a unique energy compared to other horror games. During one moment, Marianne’s spirit form is having a conversation with another character about living in an alternate reality, all the while her form in the real world goes through the motions of the discussion with no one. While this sounds odd, it comes off as a very effective and clever way to present its story across two planes of reality.
The game’s dual nature comes into play during the puzzle-solving sections as well, which also introduces Marianne’s other psychic abilities. While both of her forms are tethered and controlled at once, you can split up and focus your attention on one form to progress in the parallel world. Marianne can use astral projection to control her spirit form to explore places inaccessible to her real form, allowing you to progress further in the other world. While it is mostly situational, it does show off how much thought went into the level design, which I appreciated.
One side effect of traveling between worlds is that monsters can sometimes follow her back into the real world. In familiar fashion to Layers of Fear or Blair Witch, Marianne is vulnerable during these encounters with otherworldly monsters, and she’ll need to evade them whenever they make their presence known. These encounters function like stealth challenges rather than combat sequences, and you’ll need to hide behind cover, use distractions, or hold your breath to avoid the gaze of the spirit monsters. I found these sections unnerving, which highlighted just how vulnerable you are during these encounters.
What I found interesting about The Medium is that it focuses more on emotional storytelling rather than the simple scares and grotesque imagery. In many ways, the developers see The Medium as a culmination of the talents fostered over the years. What’s particularly fascinating is that this game has been in the works for some time, and it had a significant change in perspective in the past.
“The first iteration of The Medium was actually within first-person, and being able to rotate the camera with the split-screen effect ended up inducing motion sickness, so we transitioned it over to third-person,” said Piejko. “That ended up being a much more cinematic experience, which we were very happy to see. We had always planned this game to feel like a movie, as we planned the whole game out with storyboards, and it ended up giving us more control in how we can tell the story. Going back to the Observer, we had this great, emotional scene with Dan, but it wasn’t easy to convey that emotion because it was in first-person. But now, we can show off all the emotional range in the game. So yeah, I think it’s a great move for us going forward.”
This latest look I had with The Medium showed off a lot of promise. The absence of a new Silent Hill game in recent years has left a massive void in the horror genre that not many games have managed to fill–The Medium’s particular approach to psychological horror makes for a tense yet still interesting atmosphere, and I’ll be keeping my eye on it. As one of the first big Xbox exclusives of 2021, it can help set the tone for the platform, especially since it’s shaping up to be a clever take on the horror experience, and we’ll see how far Bloober Team can take its concept for dual storytelling when it launches later this month.
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Capcom has announced a new digital event for the Switch game Monster Hunter: Rise, promising “big news and reveals.” The Digital Event, as it’s called, will take place on January 7, starting at 6 AM PT / 9 AM ET.
It will be streamed live on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. There is no word on exactly what will be shown off or discussed, but keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.
The announcement of this new Digital Event comes not long after producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Yasunori Ichinose released a video message to fans to cap off 2020. They thanked fans for their continued support of the series and told fans to expect more news in January 2021.
Monster Hunter: Rise releases on March 26, exclusively for Nintendo Switch. It was previously confirmed that a demo for Rise would be available in January, so it seems likely that the Digital Event will bring some news about that.
Rise is not the only new Monster Hunter game coming in 2021, as Capcom also plans to release Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin in Summer 2021 for Nintendo Switch. The game will have crossover content with Rise.
Netflix had a very happy holiday. The company has announced new streaming figures for Bridgerton and We Can Be Heroes that combined to give Netflix its biggest-ever viewing week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Bridgerton is projected to be seen by 63 million households over its first four weeks, while We Can Be Heroes is on pace to tally 44 million homes over the same period of time. These combine to help Netflix achieve its “biggest viewing week between Christmas and New Year’s ever!”
In their first four weeks, it’s projected that 63 million households will have courted Shondaland’s Bridgerton and 44 million households will have suited up for Robert Rodriguez’s We Can Be Heroes, making this our biggest viewing week between Christmas and New Year’s ever! pic.twitter.com/dWoLCWn6NO
According to Variety, December 2020 and the week of December 25-31 set new records at Netflix for total viewing hours and average view hours for each subscriber.
These are giant numbers and new records at Netlix, but bear in mind that a “view” for Netflix counts when someone watches at least two minutes of a movie or TV show.
With 63 million projected households over its first four weeks, Bridgerton becomes the fourth biggest Netflix original TV show over that period of time. It’s only surpassed by Tiger King (64 million), La Casa de Papel S4 (65 million), and The Witcher S1 (76 million).
Bridgerton, which is a period piece based on the Julia Quinn Bridgerton novel series, is the first project from Grey’s Anatomy veteran Shonda Rhimes after she signed a nine-figure deal ($100M-plus) with Netlix. We Can Be Heroes, meanwhile, is a spin-off of Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and it’s written and directed by Robert Rodriguez.
It is the beginning of a new year, and with that in mind, GI.biz polled a number of video game analysts to ask for their predictions for gaming in the year to come.
One surveyed analyst was Mat Piscatella of the NPD Group. One of his predictions is that the Nintendo Switch, not the newer, more powerful PS5 or Xbox Series X|S consoles, will sell the most units in 2021 in the US.
“Despite the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, it will be the Nintendo Switch that ends up selling the most units of console hardware in 2021,” Piscatella said.
There are rumors swirling that Nintendo may release a beefier “pro” variant of the Nintendo Switch. Regardless of whether or not that comes to fruition, Piscatella said he sees a bright future for the Switch in 2021.
“I will go a step further and suggest [the Switch having a big sales year in 2021] will be driven by content and promotional efforts rather than the release of a new iterative model,” he said.
The full GI.biz piece is stuffed with interesting and informative insight from Piscatella and other analysts at different companies. Go read it.
After working with Next Level Games on numerous projects in the Luigi’s Mansion and Mario Strikers franchises, among others, Nintendo has announced it will acquire the studio.
Nintendo will buy 100% of the outstanding shares of the Vancouver, Canada-based developer, and as such, Next Level Games will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to close on March 1.
Nintendo’s announcement said, “A number of owner-directors recently determined that the time is right for them to sell their shares, and NLG therefore began exploring potential sale transactions.”
Next Level Games’ first Nintendo-exclusive project was 2005’s Super Mario Strikers for GameCube, which was followed up by Mario Strikers Charged for the Wii. Next Level Games also developer 2009’s Punch-Out!! for Wii, and later Luigi’s Mansion Dark Moon and Metroid Prime: Federation Force for 3DS, before releasing Luigi’s Mansion 3 in 2019.
Next Level Games had been an independent company before this, also working on games for Activision such as Spider-Man: Friend or Foe and Transformers: Cybertron Adventures.
Nintendo said the acquisition will have only “minor effects” for the current financial year. More details about the earnings forecasts for Nintendo factoring in Next Level Games will be announced later.
