Transparent PC peripherals are well and truly back, and I'm loving what Razer has shown so far, with this brand new Phantom White collection just revealed as a follow-up to its Phantom Green gear from earlier this year. Razer has included the likes of the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K gaming mouse in this collection, which we have earmarked as the best gaming mouse for both work and play in our buying guide. You'll be able to upgrade your entire PC gaming setup with this collection thanks to the other items included, and there's even a little something for those who prefer to game on a mobile device. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best CPU cooler 2025 My Xbox Ally X testing shows why gaming laptops *****, and why Intel x Nvidia CPUs are such a big deal Save a massive $55 on this top-spec Logitech G Pro X Superlight wireless gaming mouse, if you're quick View the full article
Former God of War studio head Meghan Morgan Juinio has warned major publishers not to focus solely on big-budget AAA games. As the gaming industry has grown, so too has the scope of games themselves, but big players in the space have also struggled with disappointing sales and financial difficulties. Now the former God of War director has offered some insight into how companies might avoid the worst consequences of these trends. View the full article
Rejoice! Battlefield 6 progression changes are inbound, and that means the sluggish rate at which you unlock weapons, attachments, and gadgets will soon be a complaint of the past. Battlefield 6 is destined to land on our best FPS games list - it's sensational - but that doesn't mean that I and the rest of the PCGamesN team haven't had a good moan about a few things recently. Progression has been a hot topic, and Battlefield Studios just outlined how it's going to make things better. However, it's also addressing two more burning issues - XP farms, and the controversial tweaks it made this week to Conquest. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best Battlefield 6 PSR loadout Battlefield 6 guides, trailers, and latest battle royale news Best Battlefield 6 weapons and guns - BF6 tier list View the full article
"So weary is the wanderer that treads upon the fertile soil." In many ways, this single echoey line embodies Bloodlines 2. Having gone through multiple teams and survived one of the most turbulent development cycles of all time, The ******** Room's take on the World of Darkness is finally here - it's in my Steam library, which I'm still pinching myself over, but it has so much to live up to. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 system requirements Ahead of Bloodlines 2, save $950 to become the ultimate World of Darkness expert Bloodlines 2 relents on paid clans, offers them to all after "frank feedback" View the full article
Razer has dropped a new retro-futuristic Phantom White version of the Razer Barracuda X Chroma headset, and I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia.View the full article
Need some more spooky games? Want a side of zombies with that? The Fanatical Build your own Capcom Horror Bundle is live now. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article
With Pokémon Legends: Z-A's massively successful launch, it's obvious the game has become a hit among players and critics alike. Players are in the midst of discovering Z-A's various secrets and mysteries, and are being surprised around every turn. View the full article
Once in a while, a truly unique board game comes along that grabs you by the unmentionables and just won't let go. The kind of board game you finish playing at 11pm and genuinely consider racking up another 3-hour playthrough of right away. The kind you go to bed thinking about, and wake up again still wanting to play. The Old King's Crown is one of these, and explaining that to you in this review is a privilege I find both delicious and daunting. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: 8 cracking titles that show board games are for grown-ups too Our favorite new board games, as of October 2025 Wargames Atlantic CEO reveals his secret identity, pledges to repay $46k debts View the full article
There's another game coming out that will have you clean up the bodies of massive creatures, with Kaiju Cleaner Simulator seeing you and friends team up for it. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article
Blizzard has just lifted the lid on Diablo 4 Season 11, or at least Diablo 4 patch 2.5.0 heading to the PTR, that will let us test the fundamental changes coming in its next big update. The major talking point is the latest itemization overhaul, one significant enough that fans have already dubbed it 'Loot 3.0.' But should it be? Rather than incremental fixes for tempering and masterworking, it's the promise of "evolved" monster combat that is more likely to solidify its reputation as one of the best RPGs on PC and draw me away from rivals like Path of Exile 2 and Last Epoch. I just hope Blizzard's behemoth is able to actually lift itself out of its seasonal cycle of torment. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Diablo 4 Season 10 details and Season 11 update Diablo's creator says Blizzard needs to push past D4's "super high" expectations The new Diablo 4 Starcraft crossover skins will cost you up to $185 View the full article
Games are an amazing medium because they can run the gamut of action-packed titles like Call of Duty and Super Mario to playable cinematics with little player involvement. Keeper definitely falls into the latter category. The latest from Double Fine Productions and Lee Petty, this Xbox Game Studios title shines when bringing the beauty of its variety in the market to the forefront. Unfortunately, I think it falls flat when compared to similar titles, even if games like this feel as necessary and important as ever from well-established studios such as this one. A beacon of light in the dark Screenshot by Destructoid Keeper's playable characters are a lighthouse and a sea bird (seriously) on an adventure to save their world’s flora and fauna from an unspoken plague, and all of this is figured out through just playing the game. Wielding the lighthouse's spotlight and a handful of buttons on the Xbox controller, the entire story is told through gameplay, context clues, the environment, and a handful of cutscenes in between sequences. There's no spoken dialogue. It's definitely a relaxing game, but maybe a bit too much so. Keeper feels like a playable art exhibit with its surreal aesthetic and odd world full of inanimate objects come to life, and the main form of gameplay is exploration, traversal, and very light puzzle-solving. The game holds your hand in numerous areas with button prompts that pop up on screen (which can be turned off), but even when it doesn't, the puzzles are shockingly linear and solvable with little thought involved. This bodes well for a variety of gamers to try it out, but I was left wanting. Over the course of Keeper's stunningly short runtime, basically everything is done in just a few buttons (left stick to move, right stick to aim spotlight and RT to focus it, X to use the bird, A for interaction and some other abilities), and the puzzles are solved just as simply. I'm not usually the biggest fan of puzzlers as they tend to frustrate me after a while, so I didn't mind the ease of use, but I still wanted a bit more of a challenge or work to be done on my behalf to finish the game, as it all felt very on-rails most of the time. The main challenge I found within Keeper was navigating its fixed camera angles, which are there to show off the game's beauty but are often cumbersome or annoying, especially when combined with needing to turn the spotlight at odd angles when the direction of the camera shifts as you move around the environment. The journey is usually the part you remember Image via Double Fine Productions Keeper isn't alone in this genre, as one can compare it to titles like Abzu, Gris, or Journey, although I greatly prefer those. That's not to say Keeper is without its enjoyable moments, as I did enjoy a good chunk of the overall experience, but it pales in comparison. It's lacking something—whether it be character or excitement or more of an overt message, I'm not sure. Sitting here and recollecting the events of Keeper after just finishing it, I'm left struggling to remember many specific parts. The lighthouse and bird team up to do a variety of good deeds throughout the events of the game's short run-time, but none of them felt too remarkable outside of a time-travel segment where you must go back and forth between past, present, and future to clear obstacles. The less you know about Keeper before going into it, the better, so I won't spoil much of the game's events or menial plot points. It's just overly simple in the end, which some may appreciate, but I feel as though most gamers will be left wanting more when the credits roll after a handful of play sessions. I finished Keeper in about five hours or so, and I enjoyed the experience for the most part. If you're a fan of playable rides like this one or have an active Game Pass subscription with a few hours to kill, I'd say go for it. But as far as $30 games go in 2025, your money is definitely better spent elsewhere. Like our content? Set Destructoid as a Preferred Source on Google in just one step to ensure you see us more frequently in your Google searches! The post Keeper review – The latest example of video games as playable art feels lacking appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article
When contemplating the essence of a lighthouse (as one so often does), you might think of words like stoic, isolated, or purposeful. But have you ever thought of them as adorable, quirky, or perhaps even charming? Keeper, the atmospheric puzzle platformer from developer Double Fine, cleverly reimagines the often forgotten seaboard structure, reframing it as a lovably sentient scout on a journey through a living world. Blending a kaleidoscopic art style with nostalgic adventure game mechanics, Keeper hides an emotional story underneath all of its visual pizzazz, delivering a brain-tickling odyssey that’s stuck with me far beyond the credits. After being separated from its flock while evading a flood of evil batlike creatures, a seabird named Twig is drawn towards a dormant lighthouse that sits on the outskirts of a mythic island. Stagnant and alone, the unexpected visitor awakens the slumbering lighthouse, causing it to shoot out a beam of warming light and scare away the evil swarm. Keeper’s story is built around the soul-stirring relationship that evolves between this unlikely duo as they fight the island’s eerie infection, navigate its curious biomes, and attempt to climb its possessed, claw-like peak. Despite there not being a single line of dialogue across Keeper’s approximately six-hour run time, I found myself wholly invested in their plight – a testament to how dynamic the pair felt in motion. It also helps that Keeper is one of the most visually interesting games I’ve ever played. The island's topology is wavy and confusing like an ant farm, with the towering summit somehow sitting at the edge of most frames, teasing you with its proximity. Every nook and cranny of its surreal, painterly world hides vast wells of depth with craggy coral, forgotten cave structures, and vibrant twisting vines intersecting like details in a Where’s Wally book. The use of fixed camera angles in Keeper is particularly inspired and evokes a cinematic atmosphere once cultivated by games like Grim Fandango and Silent Hill. Keeper doesn’t explicitly explain the lore behind its mythical, post-apocalyptic setting, instead relying on visual clues like crumpled houses and rewilded cityscapes to create a sense of danger and scale. It’s helpful that the environments you saunter through blend seamlessly together, too, with a change in the orchestration and colour palette alerting you to a new area or checkpoint more often than a loading screen. This HUD-less approach better allows you to lose yourself in Keeper’s spectacular landscapes, increasing your investment in the twosome and encouraging you to play around with your powers and discover tidbits of lore littered throughout. The HUD-less approach allows you to lose yourself in spectacular landscapes. Speaking of interacting with the world, your lighthouse powers are relatively limited but smartly utilized. You have the ability to shoot beams of light and run through obstacles to knock them down, as well as send your avian mate to pull vines or interact with levers to open doors. At first, the path forward is simple enough and involves using your light to grow vines into bridges or frighten creatures into dropping key items you need to progress. Gradually, though, Keeper increases its challenge, introducing a healthy mixture of logic and platforming puzzles that require you to weave a few interactions together in order to progress. One such puzzle involved finding and pulling a series of hidden levers to create a path through a rushing waterfall – to sniff out the levers, I needed to bound around the space and use my beam to explode fuzzy brain-like nodes, lower platforms, and grow patches of alien plants. Not every reaction you can elicit serves a gameplay-specific purpose, though, and you can also wield these powers to impact the Seussian flora and fauna around you, using your light to make trees shift in color or shiver with life. Elsewhere, curious critters react with adorable animations along the edges of paths as you walk by. It can’t be overstated that almost every screenshot of Keeper effortlessly looks like a work of art. While your base skills remain largely the same throughout the story, the world changes in a way that keeps things fresh. For example, your humble torch can eventually activate strange monuments that twist time forwards and backwards, briefly turning Twig into a ghost that can fly through walls and rotate cogs or an egg that can weigh down pressure plates – who says you can’t teach an old building new tricks? If this sounds a bit surreal, that’s because it is, but somehow it all makes sense in the context of Keeper’s intriguing world. Admittedly, it helps that each new mechanic is so thoughtfully integrated into both the story and the worldbuilding at large, with Keeper peppering in subtle tutorials through a handful of unmissable interactions at the start of each new area. Similar to Cyan World’s groundbreaking puzzle game Myst, Double Fine masterfully teaches you how to solve the puzzles ahead without overexplaining them, which helps maintain a sense of momentum without leaving you totally untethered from the larger plot. Jaw-dropping sights are further bolstered by an exquisite soundtrack. Still, there’s no rush to make it to the top of the mountain. Half the joy of Keeper is in the journey, and there are plenty of jaw-dropping sights to gawk at along the way. Each level is its own microcosm screaming with personality. You’ll visit the ethereal Pollen Fields, which are filled with cotton candy shrubs and cliff faces that look like splodges of paint someone has haphazardly run their hands through, as well as the cleverly named Horologe, a steampunk-esque city that feels architecturally Grecian. These locations are often disorienting, with brush stroke detailing and scratchy textures that reinforce the organic, handmade aesthetic. They are further bolstered by an exquisite soundtrack from composer David Earl, whose twinkling, dreamy arrangements strike a steady balance between calming and eerie, coating the world in a sense of unease. That’s not all, though, as each area is inhabited by its own creatures, too, which range from towering multi-eyed whales to rocks with legs and narrow cylindrical dragons whose coats look like woven quilts. This smorgasbord of oddities made me feel like a kid at the aquarium, using my lighthouse torch to “tap at the glass” in search of reactions. Even with their uncanny designs, the critters all fit into Keeper’s world as if they evolved there over centuries in order to survive – a theme that bleeds into every corner of this existential story. The themes at play aren’t overly complex, though understanding them does require you to read between the lines. As a lonely lighthouse, the ideas of evolution and isolation are touched on – but importantly, your interpretation of each conversation-less cutscene or puzzle will surely be influenced by your own experiences in a way that feels intentional. For me, Keeper came across as an exploration of friendship, adaptation, and the inimitable power of self-belief in a world that is struggling to cope under an oppressive force. Maybe it will mean something different to you. While I was occasionally left longing for more concrete answers to its questions, similar to the process of staring at a painting, this tale leaves the door open for you to find meaning in both the artist's intentions as well as your own. I’ve always considered Double Fine the ****** Wonka of game developers, and Keeper feels like a prime example of why. It walks and talks like a fairly digestible adventure game, but there’s also a sense of experimentation and whimsy that makes it hard to put into any one box. Caught somewhere between the ‘Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum’ and a Ratatouille flashback, Keeper flooded my senses, leaving me open to contemplate its world as a standalone creation as well as a mirror of my own. View the full article
Look out below! Team Meat's sadistic meat mascot is finally leaping into the third dimension with Super Meat Boy 3D, scheduled for early 2026 release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. It's a bold step forward for a series that originally started its life as a Flash-based sidescroller on Newgrounds, translating the blood-soaked precision platforming that defined the original 2010 cult classic into a fully three-dimensional space. Based on our hands-on time with the newest preview build, we can confidently say this isn't just the same old Super Meat Boy. Instead, it’s shaping up to be a thoughtful reimagining that captures the essence of what makes the series beloved while embracing new possibilities that only 3D can offer. For those unfamiliar with the series, Super Meat Boy is a high-speed platformer that follows the adventures of a skinless protagonist attempting to rescue his girlfriend – Bandage Girl – from the villainous Dr. Fetus… a literal fetus in a jar with a perpetual grudge. Unlike the original game and its 2020 sequel, both of which are legendary for their punishing difficulty and death-defying speed, Super Meat Boy 3D feels less unfairly brutal and more chill while retaining some of the harder challenges for those who want to reclaim the series' hardcore platforming roots in 3D. The preview build on Steam opens with an eye-catching menu, and the interface is both immediately functional and slick-looking. One quick tap of the A button on your controller and you’re thrust into the action within seconds – but, if you linger in the main menu a bit longer, you may find yourself wandering into the robust settings menu, which reveals decently comprehensive accessibility options and good flexibility in the graphics department as well. It’s cool to see options to toggle on a ground distance helper, for instance, which projects where you'll land when airborne. There's also a replay character slider that determines how many ghostly versions of Meat Boy appear in the post-level replays, watching your recorded run play back alongside multiple failed attempts in swarms of up to 100 little guys. The controls translate Super Meat Boy's responsive movement into 3D with surprising grace. The controls translate Super Meat Boy's responsive movement into 3D with surprising grace. On an Xbox controller, jumping, sprinting, wall-running, and dashing all feel snappy and precise. Meat Boy does have a slightly floaty quality in midair that took a few untimely deaths to get the hang of, but a midair dash ability (default mapped to X) allows you to correct trajectory mistakes on the fly – a crucial addition given the added complexity of navigating 3D space. Wall-running and wall-jumping work similarly to the original's wall-slides, letting you bounce between vertical surfaces to reach higher platforms. Interestingly, the preview build lacks the punch ability mentioned in the control scheme and features no combat whatsoever, leaving us curious whether enemy encounters will play any role in the final release or if this remains a pure obstacle-course platformer. A Bloody Good Time The level design effectively utilizes verticality in ways its 2D predecessors couldn't, with multi-tiered structures that had us jumping upward off walls, dashing across gaps, and ground-slamming down vertical shafts to avoid descending spike ******. The ground slam (mapped to B) proved more useful than we initially expected, letting us rapidly descend to dodge hazards that dropped from above. Environmental obstacles include classic platformer staples, like buzz saws, bear traps, crumbling platforms, and industrial crushers – alongside new physics-based challenges like the aforementioned spike ******, which drop into peculiarly-located chutes that require you first to bypass other obstacles and then properly time your descent to survive. True to series tradition, death comes frequently and gruesomely. As one might expect, Super Meat Boy 3D’s cube of exposed muscle tissue is prone to meeting countless splattery ends, immediately respawning him at the level start with the timer reset. The blood trail Meat Boy leaves on every surface he touches paints increasingly macabre patterns across the pastel environments with each attempt, and it's darkly comical watching pristine grassy fields transform into crime scenes. The sound design enhances this with squelchy, splattery audio that recalls Splatoon's ink-based aesthetic, while environmental sounds like the whir of saw blades and the mechanical grinding of crushers create an appropriately cartoony yet threatening audio landscape. Film Study Performance is measured purely by completion time and death count, with letter grades awarded based on how quickly you reach each level's exit. An A+ rank requires finishing under a target time with zero deaths, which is a tall order that demands memorization and flawless execution. There's no score system, no collectible currency, just you versus the clock and your own mortality. We did discover hidden collectible band-aids tucked into secret areas behind destructible wooden walls, though their purpose remains unclear in the preview build. Whether they unlock content, costumes, or bonus levels in the full game is anyone's guess. Speaking of post-game content, the post-level replay system deserves special mention as one of the preview's most entertaining features. After completing a stage, you watch your successful run play back while multiple ghost versions of Meat Boy attempt the same route, most meeting horrible deaths before one mirror-image completes the course following your exact path. It's simultaneously satisfying and hilarious, transforming your hard-earned victories into miniature spectacles of failure. The max replay characters setting lets you crank this up, filling the screen with doomed meat cubes. Who’s the Boss? What's less clear is the scope of the full release. The preview build contained no boss fights (though a cutscene showed what appeared to be a giant robot), no multiplayer options, and a theater mode that remained inaccessible. The narrative setup – Dr. Fetus once again kidnapping someone dear to Meat Boy, this time appearing to be Bandage Girl based on her pink coloring – suggests we're returning to familiar story beats, though the series has never prioritized plot, and from what I’ve seen so far, that trend isn’t set to change with its first 3D outing. The linear level structure and lack of significant exploration or secret-hunting may disappoint players expecting more Metroidvania-style progression, though this has always been Super Meat Boy's MO: pure, distilled platforming challenge without excessive baggage. Super Meat Boy 3D’s decently challenging and often enjoyable gameplay loop settles into a zen-like flow state once you accept the trial-and-error nature of mastery in its colorful world. This is very much a "podcast game" – something you can successfully zone out to while listening to something else, and by the fifth run through the preview build, we couldn’t help but think about how strong a fit it’ll be for Steam Deck owners who like to sneak in play sessions before bed. That's not necessarily criticism; there's value in games that don't demand your complete emotional investment, and this is undeniably one of those games. It’s just a shame that there’s no Switch 2 version currently announced. Half-joking! Nuts and Bolts The difficulty, while present, didn’t reach the soul-crushing heights the series is notorious for, at least in these early stages, but that’s not such a bad thing to bring in a broader playerbase – as long as the final version still provides ample challenge to series fans. Whether that manifests in later worlds or if Team Meat has softened the challenge for broader appeal remains to be seen, but I’m hoping it's the former. Graphically, Super Meat Boy 3D strikes a pleasing balance between the series' cartoonish aesthetic and modern rendering techniques for an increasingly atmospheric experience as the levels progress. The preview build already teases robust graphics options, including a nice list of anti-aliasing methods, post-processing effects, shadow quality, global illumination, reflections, and foliage density. While DLSS remained grayed out in my build, the game ran silky smooth at near-144fps on an RTX 4070Ti, with excellent optimization even at maximum settings on an ultrawide 3440x1440 display. The environments pop with visual personality: grassy starting areas give way to burning forests with spinning saw blades embedded in charred trees, which then transition into grimy industrial zones filled with crushers, spike-dropping machines, and pools of toxic waste. Everything maintains that high-contrast, storybook-meets-nightmare quality that defined the original, but with added geometric complexity and environmental detail that wouldn't be possible in 2D. Bring the Pain Comparisons to other modern 3D platformers are inevitable, but may be a bit unfair to the scope that Super Meat Boy 3D is tackling. What we’ve played so far lacks Astro Bot's inventively kinetic mechanics and character-driven charm, Mario Odyssey's exploratory freedom, or even ****** Bandicoot 4's level design variety. Instead, Super Meat Boy 3D feels more akin to Ghost Runner's fast-paced, die-and-retry philosophy mixed with the geometric verticality and graphical style of Pac-Man World II – and then just heavily distilled from there, down to something much smaller and tighter, like a little cube of tightly-packaged meat in a convenience store freezer. There are no rings or coins to collect here: just brutal platforming, and this reinvention does it smoothly enough to feel satisfying even after several back-to-back runs of the same preview content. Your skills will improve with each run, hitting more A+ ranks as your muscle memory develops. At least that addictive "just one more try" quality that defined the original is totally present here. The question is whether Team Meat can sustain that momentum across a full game, and whether enough content, variety, and surprises await in the final release to justify the journey into 3D. Super Meat Boy 3D shows promise as a faithful translation of the series' darker cartoon comedy appeal into three dimensions, with responsive controls, strong performance, and level design that embraces verticality while maintaining the tight challenge loops that made the original special. But, at least at this point in its development cycle, significant questions remain about the scope of its content upon release, how well its combat will feel in action, what those hidden collectibles unlock, and if this tight-knit formula can stay fresh throughout a complete game. View the full article
The Corsair Sabre V2 Pro Ultralight is one of the lightest mice on the market right now but still maintains a more affordable price point than the competition.View the full article
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has added Keeper to its content catalog. The surreal-looking adventure is the 56th new title to reach the subscription service in October 2025, as well as the 178th Xbox Game Pass Ultimate release since the beginning of the year. View the full article
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Build your ranch… and butcher your animals?View the full article