When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles.
The Game Awards are over — congratulations to Team Asobi for Astro Bot taking home the Game of the Year award. Our review of Astro Bot earlier this year called it "one of the best games Sony has ever made," and it seems the industry and game-playing public agree.
As always, the long, long stream was a hybrid award ceremony, advertising reel and game announcement marathon.
And now for something completely different. Naughty Dog is pivoting from post-apocalyptic fungal drama to interstellar sci-fi bounty hunting with its newest game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The studio revealed its new title with a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards on Thursday.
2K Games’ consistently sporadic Mafia series will return in 2025. Mafia: The Old Country is set in Sicily in the 1900s and will explore the origins of organized crime. Developer Hangar 13 announced that a new Mafia title was in development back in 2022, but gave few details beyond that. Now, we know it's heading to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in summer 2025.
There are two cool pieces of news here. First, the indie studio behind the Overcooked series, Ghost Town Games, is working on a new title called Stage Fright, and it'll support both online and couch co-op. Rad! Second, Stage Fright is being published by No Man's Sky studio Hello Games, a move that marks Hello's first foray into publishing other studios' projects. Double rad!
We told you back in 2021 that The Outer Worlds 2 was a thing that existed, and now, more than three years later, we have evidence in support of this claim: a gameplay trailer.
It’s only been a short few months since Gearbox announced Borderlands 4, the next game in its long-running looter shooter franchise. Back in August, all we had was a cryptic teaser, but at today’s Game Awards, we got a proper look at the new game.
Swedish indie studio Hazelight is synonymous with co-op gaming, so of course its next project is built for two players — but this time, it also features two genres. Split Fiction is a co-op adventure where players leap between sci-fi and fantasy worlds in a bid to escape the clutches of a greedy publishing corporation. It supports local and online play, and, fittingly, it uses split-screen.
Thick as Thieves is a new project from the team of immersive sim and stealth-action icons at OtherSide Entertainment, which includes Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, Looking Glass Studios founder Paul Neurath, and Thief: The Dark Project lead Greg LoPiccolo. Yes, that's a stacked lineup. Together, the OtherSide crew has created or worked on the System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief and Ultima Underworld series, and (along with Doug Church and Ken Levine) are largely responsible for the existence of immersive sims as we know them.
Since its announcement in March, it's sounded like Sleight of Hand should be a fantastic stealth-action game in a magical noir setting — and now it looks that way, too.