One of the true pleasures of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the sense of connection. It’s not just that Nintendo’s life sim has achieved near-universal ubiquity in a matter of days. It’s the fact that you, alongside up to seven other players, can go and visit a friend’s island. There, you can do what you’d do on…

Sorry, Astrobot Rescue Mission, but you’ve been dethroned. I, a tough customer when it comes to PSVR, have found a new PSVR game to incessantly rave about. It’s called Paper Beast, and it’s a virtual safari of some very strange animals.

What makes an independent film? The question has never had a straightforward answer, and the cultural criteria that define an indie has changed over the decades. But by and large, it has always been something that couldn’t have been made within the Hollywood system. In our attempt to assemble a list of the most…

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is an open world third-person strategy game that overwhelms you with options and choices and helps calm you back down by letting you rampage across giant medieval battlefields. Even though it’s a janky early access game, all I want to do right now is keep playing it. Clearly I’m not alone.

A good Twitch chat is like a serene sea: always welcome, but all too rare a respite from the choppier waters of the internet. Over the years, Twitch has given chat moderators tools to lock out ugliness-spewing ne’er-do-wells, but a number of loopholes have allowed dedicated trolls to slip back under the gates with…

The video game Borderlands 3 was a big sales success when it launched last fall, according to its publisher, 2K, which described it as “a billion-dollar global brand.” That’s why it was shocking to employees at Gearbox, the developer of the game, when the studio’s CEO, Randy Pitchford, told them yesterday that they…

Ducking in under the wire, April’s PlayStation Plus games are here. As always, these games are only “free” if you have an active PlayStation Plus membership.

Welcome to Wednesday. We’re halfway to the weekend!

Welcome back to Gaming Shelf, io9's column all about board games and tabletop roleplaying games. It’s now been a couple of weeks since social distancing started, making at-home game nights feel more important than ever. We’ve got some suggestions on things to play at home, as well as some upcoming releases that take Th…

Last week Atari released a new Missile Command game. This week Atari announced a new Pong. In Pong Quest, developed by UK design duo Chequered Ink, players explore fantasy dungeons inspired by other Atari classics while smacking balls back and forth. As silly as it sounds, it is a completely real game coming to…

If you’re like me, you’ve spent at least parts of the last couple of weeks animorphing into a nauseated ball of anxiety. It happens! It’s definitely okay not to be okay. And while I don’t necessarily have the solution to [gestures around at literally everything] this, I did turn some of that insomnia into a…

When Square Enix announced physical copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake would ship to Europe and Australia earlier than its April 10 release date due to the covid-19 pandemic, we didn’t think they meant this early. The eagerly anticipated game is already in the hands of many Australians, as evidenced by a growing…