Just in case you hadn’t yet explored the wonderous environments of Pokémon Sword and Shield‘s Galar region, Nintendo’s here with a brand new trailer which explores everything it has to offer.

Centring around the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra – the two areas added to the game via the DLC Expansion Pass – the video focuses on the natural landscape of these contrasting regions and the Pokémon available to see there. Oddly enough, someone’s been tasked with doing their best David Attenborough impression, which we suppose is the go-to style for any video like this.

Watch, as we examine the many wonderous Pokémon that comprise the rich tapestry of the Galar region. From a diminutive cub whose stubby arms protect it from rivals, to legendary creatures nested deep within the Crown Tundra, truly, the depths of this world are a sight to behold.

Have you checked out Pokémon Sword and Shield’s DLC yet? Did you think the two new areas added much to the overall experience? Let us know in the comments, and feel free to read our Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra reviews if you’re yet to try them out.

Holy shit 2020 happened huh? I remember writing up 2016’s games of the year and going “wow, this couldn’t possibly get any worse.”

Then came a year where playing footsies with World War 3 was a mere footnote and not a defining feature.

In all seriousness, I have nothing but love for developers who worked to ship great games in 2020. Creating great experiences while the world is on fire is its own kind of hellish experience, and I’m thankful for every one of you who worked to make something wonderful that would occupy players while the world took a wild turn.

In between stress-eating around the election and desperately dodging the ‘Rona, I happened to play a number of the games you worked on this year. Here in some particular order, are my favorites.

I give credit to Blackbird Interactive for not just making a fun science fiction game with incredible technology, but for also making a game that’s about work.

In my interview with the developers I wrote up some of my thoughts about reckoning the value of work while tearing spaceships apart, and I really feel this game nailed a particular point in our history that other task-focused games don’t.

There is majesty in tearing great metal behemoths apart, majesty that in one society, would be treated with some kind of sacredness and sense of mourning. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, it’s a ruthless task of wealth extraction that runs parallel to the struggles of labor history.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker isn’t just fun, it’s genuinely speculative. It makes you think, and it makes you ponder. It’s one of my most treasured games of this year.

The quality that Nintendo puts in all of their games continues to make titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons genuinely great, but I also want to give credit to the folks at Nintendo EPD for evolving and improving the Animal Crossing formula in a way that makes this title stand out.

By both allowing players an unprecedented level of creativity over their islands, and supporting a robust (though not perfect) multiplayer experience, they were able to create social spaces that replaced real events lost by the pandemic. People had weddings in Animal Crossing, they hung out and chatted during meteor showers. I threw a birthday party for my partner in the game!

I eventually hit a wall in the core loop of Animal Crossing, when the login bonuses and event rewards felt somewhat more like work than relaxation, but no matter. I get to look at the ways my friends have evolved their islands since I’ve left, and still enjoy the game’s output.

I had an incredible year of tabletop gaming in 2020, even though I never left my house. Why? Tabletop Simulator. Beserk Games simple physics engine, combined with a robust modding community (and some “look-the-other-way practices from various board game developers), gave me the chance to try out new games and gather with my friends in the way I might normally at a board game cafe or friendly local game store.

The true high water mark for my experience with this game this year was when a handful of friends who don’t even play many PC games jumped through hoops to install this game on their laptops just so they could play their favorite board games with friends.

I joined a gym for the first time in 2020. Then the pandemic happened. Figures.

Thankfully, Ring Fit Adventure was there to help me with my growing love for regular exercise and help me try new workouts I would otherwise have avoided. Nintendo’s not the first developer to try and gameify exercise and personal health, but it is one of the first to create a peripheral that so neatly works with a well-balanced RPG combat system.

I hope Nintendo spends 2021 recognizing that the number of Ring peripherals in players’ homes is an opportunity for other developers to create workout-flavored games, or at least a reason to develop new content for what was unexpectedly one of the best turn-based role-playing games of 2020.

There was a point, early in Ghost of Tsushima, when I was ready to write off the game as another open-world sidequest-laden collectathon, an interesting adventure unlucky enough to be in a genre dominated by triple-A developers. Luckily, it seems like the normal fatigue and exhaustion with open world games seems to be what developer Sucker Punch was interested in addressing.

Though I have qualms with the game’s central narrative about honor and legacy (Sisi Jiang’s got a good piece you should read about that), Feudal Tsushima’s open world is one of the best I’ve played since Breath of the Wild.

Where Breath of the Wild created a specific kind of openness, Tsushima benefits from a specific kind of purpose. Its open world is built on finding beauty in small places, its sidequests are adventures where the game’s hero finds compassion and empathy for the scarred people who support his quest.

Though some amount of resource-gathering and exploitation is at play in all of this, Sucker Punch’s world designers still seem to want players to find time to find peace and wonder with nature. There’s an excellent swordfighting game somewhere in there too, but I truly most enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima when I found myself in yet another wonderful location where all I could do was open photo mode and try to do justice to the beauty around me.

Hades makes its return to my Game of the Year list as the most triumphant Supergiant Games title since Bastion. I originally praised Hades for “some of the best gamefeel of 2018,” now that it’s fully launched, I can now praise it for having some of the most responsive and unfolding narrative in any procedurally-inclined game I’ve ever played.

Supergiant Games’ success isn’t just in creating yet another wonderful cast of characters, it’s for once again chasing an instinct of diving into every possible player choice and trying to pull some thread of narrative out of it. Every run, no matter how quick it ends, feels like an accomplishment because somehow the decisions players make along the way are remarked on and become a point of discussion when they return to the starting area.

Roguelike (or Rogue-lite) games can sometimes struggle with a central question of incentive: why *should* players die over and over again in pursuit of a difficult-to-obtain goal? Hades completed its Early Access journey by both imbibing the quest with human stakes (pursuing a long-lost family member) and narrative heft.

To die in Hades is to learn more about the tale of its characters. What a pleasant way to take the sting off of failure.

In a year where the Marvel Cinematic Juggernaut was forced to take a hiatus, Insomniac Games came swinging to the rescue with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. All of my praise for the original game holds true here (since many of the combat mechanics and environment choices make a direct return), but Insomniac this time took time to answer a great narrative question: who do superheroes matter to, and why do they have such power to resonate?

The creatives at Marvel had already begun to ask that question when they began work on the character in 2011, and his anxieties and growth were at the heart of the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Insomniac’s take on the character shows how this street-level hero matters to the people in his community and gives players a chance to take part in a grounded conflict wrapped up in how society grinds down poor communities of color, particularly in New York.

The fantasy of Spider-Man (previously a power trip for bullied nerds) matters to a community that spent 2020 under siege from a pandemic, and before that, the power of police brutality. Rewriting the Spider-Man mythos to empower a new kind of American hero matters in a big way, and Insomniac’s done a wonderful job telling their version of a story that rocked the silver screen and comic pages of the last decade.

One of the last lines in the game’s story is a Harlem resident shouting “he’s our Spider-Man,” and goddamn it I just started crying.

I haven’t played an incredible amount of Among Us but it would be foolish to talk about 2020’s top games and not talk about Innersloth’s runaway success. I’m still befuddled on some level by how it’s gotten so big. It’s Werewolf, it’s Mafia, it’s every “find the spy” game I played at summer camp.

And yet that simple premise is enough to fuel an indie game sensation. The sessions I played were some of the most high-stakes, life-or-death feeling arguments that could possibly play out. I begged for my life, I tried to deceive my friends, I wondered if my friends were betraying me. Emotions ran so high in one session we had to have an hour-long therapeutic conversation afterward.

Is it the task structure? The cute art? The pets? I can’t quite pin it down. But it’s here, it’s thriving, and it gives me permission to think about ways to kill my friends.

After a few years of tabletop Star Wars dogfighting, it’s been a thrill to spend the end of 2020 nervously gripping the controls of a Y-Wing on a bombing run, desperately funneling power to shields while my friends run cover for me in Star Wars Squadrons.

The developers at EA Motive deserve extra credit for pushing a passion project that transcends the studio’s near-decade long identity crisis. They had the tech, they had the vision, and they managed to get EA management involved in shipping it out.

There’s so many neat design intricacies in this game that really sell the Star Wars experience, you wish they could carve out more time to make a multiplayer game that’s freed from the demands of a truly mass market product. Ah well. I’m just glad they finally gave us a B-Wing.

Respawn’s Battle Royale game continued to astound in 2020, and I could use this space to discuss their evolving approach to a live sci-fi action game, or their transparency in grappling with the difficulties of crunch and the pandemic.

It’s more productive though to talk about the fact that my personal experience with Apex Legends continues to grow, and it’s the game that finally got me to really stick it with a ranked latter instead of just puttering about in pubs.

In Apex Legends I found space to work through the pain of losing high-stakes games and peace in the flow of winning and losing. I was able to block out a lot of the negative thoughts I picked up when I was younger and focus on a state of flow that comes from the game’s genuine sense of joy for traversal and tense fights.

I’m probably never going to be a top-tier Apex Legends player and that’s fine. But I keep getting better at this game because it affords me opportunities to learn, fail, and try again, and for once I feel comfortable enough to stick a ranking on that process.

They can often be a tricky genre to pin down, but, in spite of that, roguelikes have risen to massive popularity over the past few years. The best mobile roguelikes include turn-based gameplay, exploration or combat, as well as a harsh progression cycle, punishing you and almost invariably resetting your progress.

But the debate around what properly constitutes a roguelike is still going on because they aren’t a one-size-fits-all like many of the other genres we play. There will always be games which serve as exceptions to the rule. But in our opinion, when games are experimenting is when they are at their most fun.

One thing we can agree on for sure, though, is that the best mobile roguelikes can be recognised by the way they use constraint to create entertaining, thoughtful, and compact games that actually lend themselves wonderfully to the mobile platform. There are a ton of quality mobile roguelikes out there that you could be playing on-the-go, so lets take a look at this fantastic genre, with our list of the best mobile roguelikes.

Here are the best mobile roguelikes:

Dimension of Dreams

In the absence of a mobile version of Slay the Spire, plenty of roguelike/deck builder hybrids have stormed the App Store to try and capture that audience. Dimension of Dreams represents one of the better ones to come along recently. It’s a token premium game with in-app purchases, but we’ve found that everything is neatly balanced and scaled so that it doesn’t feel like a grind.

There are also plenty of different deck archetypes for you to play around and experiment with, so it’s a real shame it isn’t on Android yet. This, and some choice patches is all that’s stopping it from being the ultimate contender to Slay the Spire’s throne. For more games like Dimension of Dreams, see our list of games like Slay the Spire on mobile.

CRYPT OF THE Necrodancer: Amplified

Naturally, the only thing that could knock Crypt of the Necrodancer off its coveted top spot would be more Crypt of the Necrodancer. The Amplified version released in April 2019 contains both the original game as well as all DLC and add-on content from the PC version. There’s a new protagonist to take control of, Nocturna, along with new enemies, music, and new levels. This is easily the definitive version of one of the best roguelikes of this generation, and now there really is no excuse to not get involved if you haven’t already.

Immortal Rogue

It’s amazing what you can do when you take two seemingly by-the-numbers tropes and package them into something genuinely interesting. Your uber-powerful vampire may not seem that special as it terrorises society in a replayable game, but the fact that you’re doing it over countless generations is not something you see every day. In Immortal Rogue, your job is to wake up periodically and harvest human civilisation. Because reasons.

The game struggles at times from a narrative perspective, but the tactical choices you make as you slaughter your way through an age do have consequences on ages to come. Depending on who you kill, or don’t kill, enemies can appear radically different. This is an addictive, one-handed game that evokes the best of what the genre can offer.

Card Crusade

Fair, balanced, and as advertised is our elevator pitch for Card Crusade. In a niche that includes Dream Quest, Slay the Spire, Meteorfall, and others, there’s little here we haven’t seen before, but it’s a stable and competent enough game to scratch that same satisfying itch for a short spell. Pick one of several classes and delve into the dungeon, discovering loot and spells along the way, aiding you in repeat playthroughs. It’s got its share of mediocrities, but also plenty of innovation as well.

Battles have an unusual tempo to them. Of course, it’s always best to clear the field as soon as possible, but the gameplay usually occurs in bursts of activity, with some turns devoted to healing and survival, while others see you playing an especially strong card to eliminate a key foe. Here Card Crusade breaks with longstanding roguelike tradition and does not offer full healing upon level-up or floor clear, which means damage suffered becomes persistent. This is one of the game’s smartest choices, adding a sense of pressure while simultaneously rewarding clean strategy and play. For more deck-based drama, browse our picks for the best mobile card games!

MIYAMOTO

Released towards the end of last year, MIYAMOTO is an interesting blend of turn-based strategy, card mechanics, and roguelike gameplay, where the primary fault is that it’s all-too-brief. Eight levels pit you against progressively tougher enemies, as you battle your way to defeat their leader. If either your leader or the enemy’s dies, it’s game-over. Beating levels nets you coins that you can use to invest in better leaders.

The card mechanics are perhaps a bit token; there’s no way to interact with your deck of troops, but every unit is varied and unique, and the small 4×4 arena makes for some really tight tactical engagements. It a fast-paced game, as you throw your units into battle as quickly as possible, filling as many spaces around your leader as possible, so you can place troops ever deeper into an opponent’s territory. If you’re looking for something short and sweet, MIYAMOTO is an excellent new addition to your roster.

Hoplite

The hoplites of history aren’t usually considered lone wolves or heroes, but this is exactly the role that Hoplite casts you in: one nameless figure on a tight hexagon-based quest to retrieve the golden fleece. As you soldier across levels of escalating difficulty, you visit temples to get incremental bonuses. The movement and decision-making is performed with a series of swipes alongside the odd special ability. These abilities can be simple yet profound, a little deus ex machina bestowed each level, while the skill synergies are tantalizing enough to draw you in, yet fiendishly difficult to achieve, and will keep even veterans engaged.

ROAD NOT TAKEN

The winter is harsh and full of children in Road Not Taken. You, a sackcloth-clad stranger, take your torch and use what precious energy you have to brave the elements, finding and rescuing each child. Along the way, you’ll have to fend off wolves and spiteful ghosts, scavenge for food, and find materials to make campfires. Each step drains energy; more so if you’re carrying items, so the whole game is turn-based, with a soft cap on the number of steps; as energy can be replenished by eating various foodstuffs.

The procedural generation behind each run really shows off the game’s handcrafted puzzle levels. This hybrid game wears many hats, though is primarily a puzzler with crafting elements and a dash of combat.

FTL: Faster Than Light

In a quest to save the galaxy, Faster Than Light sees you power up your ship, quest for a handy crew, a devastating array of weapons, and sometimes just a spot of fuel. Real-time with pause combat works around cooldowns, with each battle encounter ending once the enemy ship is destroyed or its crew incapacitated. Honestly, the ship is the real hero, suffering hull breaches and one HP scrapes while slowly building power till it can slay the beast. The chiptune beats and graphics are neither wholly retro, nor AAA trendy, but instead create their own cool aesthetic.

Dream Quest

Dream Quest is simple: proceed through three levels as a chosen class, and build a deck strong enough to escape the realm of dreams. But like its namesake, the twists and turns this progression takes are strange and wonderful. Roguelikes typically rely on random events and imperfect knowledge, yet Dream Quest transforms these uncertainties into a must-play challenge for strategy buffs.

The total card pool is modest and manageable, but in total produces a surprising variety of synergies and unique challenges. Inscrutable sphinxes, malicious mimes, and immortal hydras, all make an appearance as foes, offering show-stopping battles. Dream Quest’s endgame is also supremely satisfying.

Auro

The result of Keith Burgen’s careful tinkering and experiments, Auro is a roguelike that hinges around bumping monsters and creating spell combos. The prince must save the kingdom, judiciously using his magic and skills across this hex-based battler. Speed, precision, and efficiency are paramount, and score-chasing is the measure of success. Not praised enough, and an android exclusive to boot.

Crowntakers

With a sense of scale, while balancing tactical combat with long-term investments, Crowntakers needn’t even be played as a roguelike at all. For one, its alternate play mode is a persistent RPG with unlockables. The emphasis on individual decisions in the game is paramount, from the exploration phase to the combat. But its limitations lie in how carelessly it hides information from the player, about enemy abilities, for example. In short, an excellent, refreshing roguelike RPG that, while outmatched by others, remains a distinct favorite. Check our list of the best mobile RPGs for more like Crowntakers.

Dead cells

This hack ‘n slash dungeon running roguelike is one of the most popular in recent memory, and made a pretty big splash when it launched on PC back in 2017. Since then it has made its way to Android and iOS. In the game you play as a re-animated corpse of sorts, making its way through an ever-shifting castle trying out different combat combinations and synergies on the enemies and bosses who inhabit it.

Downwell

Despite its unassuming look, Downwell possesses the ability to thrill just as much as any other game on this list. It’s a propulsive, intensely challenging roguelike that sees you falling down a monster-infested well with a pair of ruddy gun-boots strapped to your feet. It’s just as awesome as it sounds, especially as you continue to bolster your abilities in the leadup to your epic battle against the game’s final boss.

That’s all the games we’ve got! If you want some more card-based roguelikes, be sure to browse our list of games like Slay the Spire on mobile. You can also actually get Slay the Spire on the App Store now. We hope you find something enjoyable to play!

A growing industry of companies called private-sector offensive actors – or PSOAs – is creating and selling cyberweapons that enable their customers to break into people’s computers, phones and internet-connected devices. Now, one of these 21st-century mercenaries, called the NSO Group, is attempting to cloak itself in the legal immunity afforded its government customers, which would shield it from accountability when its weapons inflict harm on innocent people and businesses. The firm also contributes to the urgent cybersecurity challenges discussed by our president Brad Smith last week. We believe the NSO Group’s business model is dangerous and that such immunity would enable it and other PSOAs to continue their dangerous business without legal rules, responsibilities or repercussions. That’s why today we filed an amicus brief – along with Cisco, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, VMWare and the Internet Association – in a legal case brought by WhatsApp against the NSO Group.

The NSO Group sold governments a program called Pegasus, which could be installed on a device simply by calling the device via WhatsApp; the device’s owner did not even have to answer. According to WhatsApp, the NSO Group used Pegasus to access more than 1,400 mobile devices, including those belonging to journalists and human rights defenders. We believe companies like NSO Group selling tools like Pegasus are concerning for three reasons.

First, their presence increases the risk that the weapons they create fall into the wrong hands. Previously, sophisticated nation-state hacking capabilities resided in a small number of governments with well-funded agencies focused on developing these weapons. Even then, government-created espionage tools got into the hands of other governments who used them in attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya that spread like wildfire beyond the targeted victims and ultimately devastated lives and disrupted businesses around the world. Lowering the barrier for access to these weapons would guarantee that such catastrophes would be repeated.

Even if the tools are sold to governments who use them for narrowly targeted attacks, there are a variety of ways they can still fall into the wrong hands. For example, private actors like the NSO Group and their less sophisticated customers may lack the defenses some governments use to protect the weapons, making them more susceptible to cyber-theft. For example, an Italian company called Hacking Team – one of NSO’s competitors – was itself hacked in 2015. Additionally, targets of these weapons can observe, reverse-engineer and then use these tools for their own purposes.

Second, private-sector companies creating these weapons are not subject to the same constraints as governments. Many governments with offensive cyber capabilities are subject to international laws, diplomatic consequences and the need to protect their own citizens and economic interests from the indiscriminate use of these weapons. Additionally, some governments – like the United States – may share high-consequence vulnerabilities they discover with impacted technology providers so the providers can patch the vulnerability and protect their customers. Private actors like the NSO Group are only incented to keep these vulnerabilities to themselves so they can profit from them, and the exploits they create are constantly recycled by governments and cybercriminals once they get into the wild.

Third, companies like the NSO Group threaten human rights whether they seek to or not. An analysis of recent cyber-attacks was able to identify five countries using offensive cyber capabilities between 2012 and 2015: Russia, China, North Korea, France and Israel. Between 2016 and 2018, however, the cast of characters changed to include countries like the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan. And public reporting has identified clients of cyber-surveillance companies like the NSO Group to include Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Reporting also shows foreign governments are using those surveillance tools, bought from PSOAs, to spy on human rights defenders, journalists and others, including U.S. citizens. These tools allow the user to track someone’s whereabouts, listen in on their conversations, read their texts and emails, look at their photographs, steal their contacts list, download their data, review their internet search history and more. Just yesterday The Citizen Lab reported that between July and August of this year NSO’s Pegasus program was used to hack 36 phones belonging to journalists, producers, anchors and executives at Al Jazeera. Privacy is fundamental to the ability of journalists to report, of dissidents to speak their voices and of democracy to flourish and these tools threaten their rights and their lives.

The expansion of sovereign immunity that NSO seeks would further encourage the burgeoning cyber-surveillance industry to develop, sell and use tools to exploit vulnerabilities in violation of U.S. law. Private companies should remain subject to liability when they use their cyber-surveillance tools to break the law, or knowingly permit their use for such purposes, regardless of who their customers are or what they’re trying to achieve. We hope that standing together with our competitors today through this amicus brief will help protect our collective customers and global digital ecosystem from more indiscriminate attacks.

Tags: amicus brief, cybersecurity, NSO

Yet another publisher sale has appeared on the Nintendo eShop, this time offering up great deals on both Switch and 3DS.

Yes, Capcom is back with a brand new sale that sees the likes of Resident Evil, Phoenix Wright, Mega Man, Okami, Street Fighter and more all reduced. We’ve got all of the sales currently live in North America listed for you below, although plenty of similar deals can also be found on the European stores:

Switch

– Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen – $14.99 (was $29.99)
– Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy – $14.99 (was $29.99)
– Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – $15.99 (was $39.99)
– Okami HD – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Onimusha: Warlords – $7.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil 0 – $12.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil – $12.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil 4 – $14.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil 5 – $14.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil 6 – $14.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil Revelations – $7.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil Revelations 2 – $7.99 (was $19.99)
– Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection – $14.99 (was $29.99)
– Devil May Cry – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Devil May Cry 2 – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition – $11.99 (was $19.99)
– Mega Man 11 – $14.99 (was $29.99)
– Mega Man Legacy Collection – $9.99 (was $14.99)
– Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Mega Man X Legacy Collection – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection – $19.79 (was $29.99)
– Shinsekai: Into the Depths – $14.99 (was $19.99)

3DS

– Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney – $9.99 (was $19.99)
– Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate – $5.99 (was $19.99)
– Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate – $8.99 (was $29.99)
– Monster Hunter Generations – $15.99 (was $39.99)
– Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – $8.99 (was $29.99)
– Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice – $11.99 (was $29.99)
– Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy – $11.99 (was $29.99)
– Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D – $4.99 (was $19.99)
– Resident Evil Revelations – $7.99 (was $19.99)
– Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition – $4.99 (was $19.99)
– Mega Man Legacy Collection – $5.99 (was $14.99)

For North America, all the deals listed above will expire on 4th January at 11:59pm PT. In Europe, those deals are part of Nintendo’s huge 900+ game sale currently taking place on the Switch eShop.

If you’re after even more great savings, remember that both Ubisoft and Bandai Namco are also currently hosting sales.

Which of the reduced games listed above take your fancy? Let us and other readers know your recommendations by leaving a comment down below.