‘What We Want to Do is Scare the S–t Out of Players. So We’ll do Whatever Is Necessary To Achieve That Goal.’

This is Outlast, a first-person, combat-free horror game about investigating an asylum. It’s coming to PC (Steam) at the end of the summer by new development studio Red Barrels. We saw the game at PAX East last weekend. Supposedly one of the people who tried the game at PAX was so freaked out that he…

The Case Of The Flawed Metacritic Study

A study looking into the hidden formula that drives Metacritic made headlines this week, but Kotaku has discovered some critical errors that call it into question. Earlier this week, Full Sail University professor Adams Greenwood-Ericksen held a GDC session in San Francisco in which he shared some of his research on the effects of Metacritic,…

Here’s What I Want from BioShock Infinite’s DLC

It’s already known that BioShock Infinite will have DLC packs at some point in the coming months. Irrational Games hasn’t said yet what the add-ons are going to be but, with no multiplayer component to Infinite, there’s a chance that these might be story-centric add-ons like the excellent Minerva’s Den DLC for BioShock 2 At…

Here’s Shovel Knight, A Surprise For Folks Who Miss the SNES

Shovel Knight is one of the many indie games that caught my eye at last weekend’s PAX East. It’s the only one that had me thinking Zelda II, though the retro-loving developers at Yacht Club Games also cite DuckTales and Mega Man as influences. Before I could even find Kotaku editor Chris Person, I had…

Tim Schafer Is Very 80s, And So Are These Other Movers And Shakers

This week at the Game Developers Conference iam8bit put together a great photo shoot opportunity for attendees where you could get done up in 80s fashion. They even had hair and makeup on hand to put it all together. The results are nothing short of fantastic. There are three galleries-worth of Facebook photos you can…

The Most Hysterical Video Games Set In A Prehistoric World

There’s not a single video game with a prehistoric setting that takes itself seriously. All these games – mostly platformers – look cartoonish, have ridiculously wacky yet lovable main characters and never really cared about the few million years that separated dinosaurs and mankind. Ugh! In this ’92 game we have to pick up passangers…

Hideo Kojima Excluded David Hayter from the New Metal Gear To Freshen Things Up

Yesterday, news broke that David Hayter—the man who’s been the voice of Solid Snake in all the English language releases of the storied Metal Gear Solid games—wouldn’t be coming back to reprise the role. Worse still, Hayter said that he wasn’t even asked to return. Last night, during a televised interview on GameTrailers, Metal Gear…

Tomb Raider: The New York Times review. (By your Kotaku editor-in-chief.)

The ‘GDC Fedora’ Really Got Around

There was a very special fedora at this week’s Game Developers Conference. It was placed on the heads of numerous top game creators, such as PopCap Games co-founder John Vechey (left) and Metal Gear mastermind Hideo Kojima (right). This one hat capped some other great craniums as well. To see them all, check out the…

Watch A Bunch Of People Talk About JRPGs

This week’s Random Encounters is a special bonus video edition! Here’s footage of my JRPG panel at PAX East last weekend, Do JRPGs Really Still Matter?*, brought to you by MMO Reporter *Spoilers: the answer is yes. Yes they do.

Old Spice Commercials Mashed With Super Mario Bros. And…WTF Did I Just Watch?

Uhhhhhhh wait a minute. I have a question about this. This’ll just take a second, bear with me. Um: What? The video above video, uploaded by Mowtendoo in celebration of a million views on this… …equally confusing video, is a little over a month old, but I couldn’t help but share it with you so…

The Moneysaver: Battlefield 4 Pre-order Blitzkrieg

Seventeen minutes of trailer later, Battlefield 4 is up for pre-order, and already marked down as much as $12. Like we did with Bioshock: Infinite, we’re covering the best deals on Battlefield 4 before and after it comes out, starting now. This war of pre-order bonuses is certain to evolve over time, but generally when…

The Wii U Won’t Be Getting Unreal Engine 4 [Update]

This week at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games took their usual opportunity to show off the latest developments in their whiz-bang Unreal graphics technology. In addition to the shooty/demonic demos in futuristic/fantasy settings, one of the most touted features of the engine was that it can scale from next-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4…

Not Sure if Ridiculous Fishing Is the Best Fishing? Take a Look at This.

Vlambeer’s great mobile game about highly aggressive angling is one of the best iPhone games to come out this year. Maybe it’s because it realizes that real-world fishing can be hella boring. Cartoonist Zac Gorman homes in on that snooze-inducing reality and tweaks an old proverb to explain why Ridiculous Fishing deserves all the love.…

The Original Captain Kirk and an Old-School Gorn Fight Over the New Star Trek Game

The next installment in J.J. Abrams’ re-imagining of Star Trek is out in a couple of weeks, promising all kinds of gut-wrenching tragedy and hard-won vengeance. The tie-in game acts as a prequel for Into Darkness and is a co-op experience where Kirk and Spock team up to battle the Gorn. So who better to…

This Is Running on a PlayStation 4 in Real Time, According to Epic

You may have seen this graphics demo before. It shows off the Unreal Engine 4, the next-gen graphics tech from the company behind Gears of War, Infinity Blade and the graphics engine that runs a lot of modern PC and console games. But if you saw it before, you saw it running on a PC.…

It’s Only a Little Magicka, But It’s Enough for a Party

As promised last month, Paradox Interactive and mobile developer Ludosity have teamed up to deliver a little cross-platform Magicka mayhem for the iPhone and Android. Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet is nowhere near as deep and destructively satisfying as its PC inspiration, but it’s got the right idea. the right idea, by the way,…

Impressive Unreal Engine 4 Graphics Demo ‘Infiltrator’ Leaks Early. This Is Next-Gen?

This is a tech demo called Infiltrator that the people at Epic Games have been showing to reporters and developers all week at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Is it a game? Or just a way to show off what the Unreal Engine can do for next-gen video game graphics? I’m…

In 70 Or So Years, The Game Grumps Will Be The Game Gramps And This Is Both Funny And Depressing

Are you guys aware of the Game Grumps, a team made up of YouTube personalities Arin (known as egoraptor) and Jon (known as JonTron)? They’re great. They play through (mostly) old and horrible games and record their shenanigans for the Internet. And, sometimes, animators and Source filmmakers recreate these shenanigans in even more hilarious ways…

Will Iron Man 3 break the film franchise’s streak of crappy game adaptations? Gameloft might be onto something here.