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Shudder’s original anthology series Creepshow has its second season premiering on the streaming service on April 1–and it’s already been renewed for Season 3. One thing horror fans will love about Season 2 though is that one tale is a love letter to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead.

The story titled “Public Television of the Dead” pays homage to the classic Evil Dead franchise. During AMC Networks TCA winter tour presentation, director Greg Nicotero spoke about this specific feature. “Rob Schrab wrote that episode,” the director said. “I realized in retrospect that a lot of my episodes were period pieces. A lot of them take place in the ’70s. I have a big affection for growing up in the ’70s and reading Famous Monsters magazine and watching chiller theater.

“So, having directed “Model Kid,” which is the first segment in the premiere, ‘Public Television of the Dead’ is really sort of my kind of big thank you to Sam Raimi because I worked on Evil Dead 2, and I worked on Army of Darkness. I had always had a massive affection for Sam, so I feel like I channeled my best Sam Raimi in that episode, and damn, I had so much fun like getting that camera whipping around and like the evil for his point of view and designing our own version of the Necronomicon. It was really a blast so much fun.”

In addition to this upcoming second season in April, Shudder released a Holiday Special in December, which featured killer Santas and werewolves.

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About an hour into Little Nightmares II, I found a toy duck resting on a hardwood floor. It was the kind of carved, wooden plaything that kids drag around on a piece of twine, with wheels where the real waterfowl’s webbed feet would be. A dim spotlight from somewhere above shone on its reflective wings. Behind it, there was an oaky barrier, formed from leaning one table against another–too tall for my character, a tiny child named Mono, to climb. When I approached, the floorboard the duck was sitting on sunk into the floor. I turned to run just as a metal light fixture swung down from the ceiling, smashing me into the barrier and killing me.

Once the checkpoint reset, I tried again, attempting to quickly run away from the floorboard before the pendulum fell. No dice. Again, it smashed me against the wall.

“I wonder if I can…” I thought, eyeing the nearby toy, “…duck.”

When I respawned, I set the pressure plate off again and crouched down. Sure enough, the light fixture whooshed over my head, hit the barrier, and came to a halt. I climbed onto the light, and used the impromptu step stool to hop the barrier, marveling at the way developer Tarsier Studios had cleverly used a colorful environmental detail as a hint for a puzzle–a joke where a sigh of relief greeted the punchline instead of laughter.

Lasting relief, however, is nowhere to be found on Mono’s journey. From the moment we first meet Mono, alone in the woods, he is vulnerable. His horrifying adventure takes him out of the woods and through a frightening cityscape haunted by humans who have turned into frightening parodies of mundane occupations, like a teacher whose watchful eyes dart at the end of a long, distended neck. Though Little Nightmares 2 tells its story wordlessly, we can easily intuit Mono’s goal: escape. Tarsier’s imaginatively brooding art helps to sell this story. As the player, you may want to play in this world, but Mono’s clear motivation is to find a painless route to safety.

Many of Little Nightmares II’s best moments are structured like jokes: tense build-up released by a climactic surprise. For example, with there being no weapons in the first game, I was shocked when, during the first chapter, the solution for dealing with a vicious pursuer was to pick up a shotgun with my AI companion, Six, and shoot our stalker dead. There are other moments like this, where Tarsier takes what you thought you knew and suddenly upends it, leaving you shocked and sputtering. These moments are especially effective if you’ve played the previous game. But, regardless of your past experience with the series, there is a catharsis inherent in these rare moments when our fragile characters finally get a chance to fight back.

Since the release of the first entry in 2017, the Little Nightmares series has combined the dark and the playful, casting players as little kids in a world of big and powerful monsters. Levels are presented as dioramas. If you move the camera far enough to the left or right, up or down, you can see the black space where the room ends. Walk close enough to the camera and your character will hit an invisible fourth wall. The overall effect is such that you simultaneously feel like a kid–maybe a sadistic one like Sid from Toy Story, but a kid nonetheless–playing with toys in their toybox and like the toys themselves.

Stellar art direction helps sell this. The settings that you jump and climb through have a moody sense of crumbling realism. I particularly enjoyed a platforming section that had me evading a monster by climbing across sprawling bookshelves in a library that, from my tiny perspective, seemed impossibly big. The rain and lighting effects set the tone for the world, one that leaves you feeling vulnerable. While the environmental art aims for realism, the enemy designs are grotesquely cartoonish. In Little Nightmares II, you will be alternately hunted by all kinds of monsters, from a larva-shaped man who clings to the ceiling and chows down on dead bodies to a monstrous schoolmarm with sharp teeth and a veiny neck that can stretch almost endlessly in pursuit of prey. These characters are unsettling in a way reminiscent of the darker Jim Henson works like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and the visual similarity to puppetry helps sell the dark fantasy that you are a child in a frightening, violent world.

Tarsier uses this unsettling art design to terrific effect. In one of my favorite moments in the game, you don a disguise and sneak through a room filled with dozens of enemies–the most you’ve seen at once at this point in the game. There’s a sense of mounting dread to that scene, as your ruse could fall apart at any second, forcing you to have to outrun a terrifying number of enemies. Little Nightmares II has several moments that tap into a similar dread, effectively building and sustaining an indelibly dark mood that lasts for most of the game.

But mood alone isn’t enough to keep a game interesting for long, and Little Nightmares II fittingly has some great puzzles. Your verbs are fairly limited most of the time–you can run, jump, climb, and both pick up and pull objects. But Tarsier combines those actions with clever worldbuilding to make some truly memorable headscratchers. A personal favorite involved using an X-ray machine to reveal a key within a stuffed animal and then using an incinerator in the nearby morgue to access the hidden object. This puzzle was both a joy to solve and successfully communicated the history of how this building was used before the world became what it is. Little Nightmares II has plenty of inventive puzzles beyond that, and Tarsier’s secret weapon is its thoughtfulness in linking its puzzles to the history of Little Nightmares 2’s richly imagined world.

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The addition of weapons results in some memorable sequences (like the aforementioned shotgun-toting confrontation), but it also pushes Little Nightmares II into frustrating territory. Sometimes your character, Mono, will find an axe or sledgehammer on the ground that’s necessary for solving a puzzle or defeating an enemy in your way, but, being a tiny child, he can only drag it along the floor. The scrape of the blade on concrete is pitch-perfect, and the sensation of shifting the weapon’s weight to bring it down on an opponent or obstacle feels satisfyingly hefty. But there are a few occasions where you’re expected to take out multiple enemies in a row without getting hit, and these encounters are more frustrating than fun because of how slow Mono wields weapons. The window for landing a hit is brief, and even though certain enemies take more than one hit to go down, you will always die in a single hit, so you sometimes have to perfectly time several hits in a row or you’ll be sent back to a checkpoint. These moments are irritating hang-ups in your progress that otherwise, by and large, feels pretty smooth.

There is one specific roadblock that’s not so easily overcome. During a puzzle sequence near the end of the game, you must find the correct sequence of doors by listening for an audio cue that gets louder as you approach the right door. In addition to being nigh unsolvable for players who are deaf or hard-of-hearing–barring a series of lucky guesses–this puzzle is a tedious and unsuccessful subversion of the formula Tarsier has followed for the rest of the game. In the several hours leading up to this, Little Nightmares 2 teaches you that if you study the environment closely enough, you can solve any puzzle it presents. That’s not the case here, and the result is a section of gameplay that is both uninteresting and inaccessible. The music was crucial for me in solving the puzzle, and more obvious visual cues or closed-captions would be necessary to make this portion of the game playable for everyone.

That puzzle’s placement in the game hammered home for me that Little Nightmares II was stretching on for a bit too long. After one climactic encounter, which felt like it should herald the end of the game, my play experience dragged on for another hour, including that tedious puzzle and a frustrating final boss fight. This concluding section of the game just goes on for too long, and none of the mechanical ideas introduced in the last chapter are interesting enough to warrant the added length.

Little Nightmares II is a delightfully spooky foray into a horrifyingly gorgeous world. It’s also a bit too long, occasionally frustrating and, in one key moment, inaccessible for players who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. But, overall, it represents a successful follow-up from Tarsier. With inventive puzzle design and some startlingly original levels, it isn’t quite a dream come true, but it certainly won’t have you waking up, bolt upright, screaming, in a cold sweat.

Few games get me as hyped as Final Fantasy XIV, the MMORPG that’s had a wild ride and increasing success over the past several years. Because of it, director and producer Naoki Yoshida, and the team behind the game, have made waves within Square Enix and now have the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI on their hands. But FFXIV’s journey is far from finished, nor is it taking a backseat. Endwalker, which is set to launch in Fall 2021, is the next expansion, and while it’ll conclude the 10-year story arc that’s been the centerpiece since the game’s early days, FFXIV’s scale is only getting larger.

The expansion was revealed and showcased in detail earlier this month, and I have a breakdown of everything you need to know about Endwalker (for one, we’re going to the moon). More recently, I was able to correspond with Yoshida-san via email to get some insight on the lead-up to new expansion–and I think the overall sentiment is that Endwalker and the position FFXIV is in today was never promised, but was always planned for.

“The idea of creating a large-scale saga and bringing closure to it after multiple expansions came about when we were working on A Realm Reborn (2013),” Yoshida-san started. He continued, “However, in order to make that idea a reality, gaining popularity and acquiring the adequate funds and acclaim to continue long-term service would be required.”

“Until the launch of Heavensward, whether we would be able to achieve our goal was largely dependent upon if players were enjoying the game and continuing to play, and it wasn’t until after the release of Stormblood when I finally felt confident that we would be able to make this a reality,” he concluded.

With FFXIV’s growing financial success, some of those ambitions were fulfilled in the 2019 expansion Shadowbringers. It’s often regarded as one of the best stories told in Final Fantasy history–a testament to the work of its lead writer Natsuko Ishikawa, who has also taken on that role for Endwalker. In a previous conversation with Yoshida-san, he talked about to this interconnectedness of Shadowbringers. Its core narrative was built on side content from years ago, and he explained that was left in limbo in case they wanted to revisit it. But it was also an exercise of closure for a meticulous, personal storyline.

As impactful as Shadowbringers was, bringing closure to nearly everything up to this point, and finally executing on that idea from all those years ago through Endwalker, is another level of ambition. Yoshida-san said, “What I’m really excited about is seeing how people will react, feel, and be surprised by what is to come.” And the last time he said that it was about the 5.3 update storyline, which certainly delivered.

As you can probably imagine, planning and development for subsequent patches and expansions happen well ahead of time to keep up with a regular cadence that was established back in 2013–for example, Endwalker’s story was already wrapped up by October 2019. Yoshida-san even dedicated a lengthy segment to explaining the management process in the latest Live Letter From The Producer update stream. In being transparent and communicative with the FFXIV community, he has also shed light on how the team has transitioned to work-from-home conditions, the prioritization of personal life amid a global pandemic, and the changes to the development of new content.

They’ve had to shuffle around priorities with content and push updates back, and it ultimately affected the launch of Endwalker, which was originally planned for Summer 2021. But even in the midst of a dramatic shift, the quality of the game’s updates has been consistent. And it seems that is extending to Endwalker, at least in terms of its breadth.

“We’re scrambling to somehow get everything done by our deadlines, but I can assure you that the volume of the main scenario will not be any smaller than those of previous expansions,” Yoshida-san said. “How the scale and scope of the game end up depends on the effort of the staff, but what l can say is it will be more than 50 hours of gameplay.”

From what we can glean from the Endwalker’s teaser trailer and announcement presentation, there is going to be a lot packed into those 50-or-so hours, especially considering all the lingering story threads. The FFXIV team made no bones about players going to the moon in-game, which is core to Endwalker’s premise, and so many implications were hinted at about the game’s world, too. But that trailer also featured Alisaie and Alphinaud in a big way, long-time characters who finally showed up in a FFXIV cinematic. It got me thinking about the exceptional character development and focus Shadowbringers brought to its core cast, and I asked if that ethos is being carried into Endwalker.

“You’re correct that we did focus on that aspect for our characters in Shadowbringers, and I believe you’ll be able to see how we will dive deep into various characters so that you can get a glimpse of their inner selves,” Yoshida-san stated. While Heavensward and Stormblood largely told stories about factions, politics, and humanity, Shadowbringers brought a new sense of intimacy that made us see FFXIV and its characters in a new light. He followed up, saying, “Just like our players–the Warriors of Light–have gone through this journey to hear, feel, and think, the same applies to the NPCs.”

When it comes to anything beyond Endwalker, it seems that the team doesn’t have time to dive into other projects or plans for now. While this expansion marks an end and a new beginning for FFXIV, Yoshida-san said, “We’re currently focused solely on creating Endwalker, so there’s nothing else in my mind aside from delivering the finale of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark story arc to our players.”

However, he did drop a hint about how they may try new approaches in a post-Endwalker world. Read into it what you will, but Yoshida-san said, “I believe the development staff are most keen on finding out more about the next story, including how long it might be and if we’ll be going in the direction of shorter storylines. It’s still a secret!”

With Yoshida-san calling this “the end of the first saga of FFXIV,” loosely mentioning five-to-ten more years of regular content and alluding to secrets for the game’s future, we at least know that FFXIV has a lot more left in the tank.

FFXIV has been in a unique position as an MMORPG that has hooked a wide playerbase with a sharp narrative that stands tall alongside its single-player counterparts. It is the main appeal of Endwalker, too. For one, I am expecting more wild revelations and stunning moments that the game has consistently delivered. But given the formula we’ve grown accustomed to, I’m also looking forward to how the FFXIV team handles what seems to be uncharted territory for the game, building something beyond the initial vision established back in A Realm Reborn.

The expansion isn’t the only thing FFXIV has in store for the year. Patch 5.5 is a two-part update, set for April 13 and the end of May, that will usher players into the story of Endwalker along with a slew of new content. And between those two updates is FFXIV Fan Fest on May 15 and 16, where we can expect more details on Endwalker and the full cinematic intro.

From the free trial that includes the Heavensward expansion and lets players go up to level 60, and my FFXIV beginner’s guide, it’s as good a time as any for newcomers to see what Square Enix has built over the past several years. There’s also plenty of time from now until Endwalker launches sometime in Fall this year. For current players, looking forward intensifies.

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GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Actor Viggo Mortensen, who famously portrayed Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series, has revealed his unusual audition tactic that led other actors to believe he was a stoner. Speaking to James Corden, Mortensen early in his career he used to intentionally fall asleep in the waiting room for his auditions to help calm his nerves as he awaited his turn.

The unintended consequence of this was that other actors thought he was a stoner. They even gave him a pet name: “Sleepy Mortensen.”

“I used to get very nervous when I was in the waiting room, sitting there with other guys, knowing they’re your competition. My automatic way of dealing with it, I guess, was that I would just fall asleep,” he said. “If I was nervous, I’d sleep so I wouldn’t be stressed. I would just doze off. Snoring away. And then somebody would come and wake me up when it was my turn. I found out sometime later that I had gotten a reputation for being a stoner or something. So… they just thought, ‘That’s Sleepy Mortensen, he’s probably smoking too much weed.'”

The other actors who saw Mortensen in this state thought he was a big fan of the jazz cigarette, but no, it was just Mortensen’s way of dealing with anxiety. Years in the future, Mortensen met one of his contemporaries who was often up for the same roles, and Mortensen said this person–whom he did not name–told Mortensen that he was being dastardly with this tactic. This actor thought Mortensen was falling asleep on purpose to make the other actors in the waiting room think he barely cared.

“Years later, I ran into one of the guys who was always the competition, and got most of the roles, he said, ‘That was a really cruel thing you used to do to us.’ I said, ‘What thing?’ ‘Oh you did this psychological warfare thing where you’d pretend to be sleeping before the audition.'”

Mortensen laughed in the interview because it’s so far from the truth because the irony is that he was not feeling confident but instead very nervous.

Well, it all worked out for Mortensen in the end. He got cast as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, a performance that would define his career, and he went on to earn Oscar nominations for Eastern Promises, Captain Fantastic, and Green Book. He just recently wrote and directed his first movie, Falling, which is out now.

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Lining up with this weekend’s BlizzCon, Blizzard is offering up the previously-announced Helm of Domination collectible, which goes on sale tomorrow, February 19 at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET on the Blizzard Gear Store. We got to take a closer look at it, and it’s very spikey.

Blizzard sent us the collectible, and the helmet may not be big enough to fit on your own head, but this World of Warcraft 30th anniversary replica is highly-detailed and feels pretty sturdy. Primarily made of polyresin (88%, Plastic: 6%, and Alloy: 6%), the collectible comes in at nearly 17-inches tall–when placed on the stand. However, this helmet will cost you a pretty penny–$300 to be exact. Check out some images of it below.

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The stand for the helmet keeps it in place and upright. There is a tremendous amount of detail within the helmet, including the inscription around the gem between the eyes. It’s surprising how well this helmet translates into a collectible. And no, it’s not full scale, but this helmet is already very large, and scaling it up any more would make a challenge to put on a shelf–because you wouldn’t have the room.

World of Warcraft is filled with incredible amounts of lore and backstory, but this is one of the more recognizable items from that world. “Forged according to the Jailer’s will, the Helm of Domination was to be the vessel of Death’s influence on Azeroth,” reads the official description for the item. “The Nathrezim imprisoned the spirit of the orc chieftain Ner’zhul within the helm, granting him command over a vast army of undead Scourge. The fallen Prince Arthas Menethil freed the Helm from the Frozen Throne, donning it to take up the mantle of the Lich King.”