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endless

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault isn’t closing up shop, but it has received a small delay out of a busy October

by admin October 1, 2025

There just doesn’t seem to be a good time to release a game right now, does there? We all saw the way that Hollow Knight: Silksong scared away plenty of games, even games with completely different genres. And sometimes it’s just a case of a particular month being stacked – just this month alone there’s Ghost of Yotei, Battlefield 6, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Ninja Gaiden 4, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, the list truly goes on. So, I really can’t blame developer Digital Sun, who’ve announced that Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault has been delayed.

The developer shared word of said delay in a Steam news post earlier today, as the game was originally slated for release October 23rd, later this month. But, as they note, “the month has filled up with so many other great releases that we feel it has become too crowded for us. And as every wise shopkeeper knows, even the most precious gem can be overlooked in an overstuffed showcase.” So now, you can expect the game to launch on November 19th, a little more than a month later.

As a little bonus to make up for the delay, Digital Sun will also be running some closed playtests to let you try the game out, in particular to get a feel for some of the changes made based on community feedback. More details on that are coming soon, apparently.

Moonlighter 2 looks like it’s picking up where the original game left things off, gameplay wise at least, having now been transported to the realm of 3D. Based on an interview between the devs and TheGamer earlier this year, you can also expect it to fully lean into being a roguelike, which admittedly is a bit of an oversaturated genre right now. Fingers crossed the still fun concept of having to plunge into dungeons to stock your own shop is strong enough to find success this time around too!

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Battle Through A Never-ending Story In Chronoscript: The Endless End Next Year

by admin September 25, 2025

Chronoscript: The Endless End is an upcoming Metroid-style 2D action game with a killer aesthetic. Players control an editor trapped inside the pages of a book, and must fight for his life to escape.

The game comes from developer DeskWorks (makers of the similarly hand-drawn RPG Time: The Legend of Wright), and stars an editor who, after visiting a mysterious manor, becomes bound to the pages of his unfinished, never-ending manuscript. This story has been ongoing for a thousand years and refuses to end; it’s up to us to find a way to end this long-running narrative once and for all. Chronoscript’s hand-drawn pen art aesthetic looks great, and the gameplay plays with its premise by letting players traverse through pages and even swim through spilled ink to reach new areas.

Chronoscript: The Endless End is set to launch in 2026 on PlayStation 5 and PC.

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September 25, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Check out the intricate, inky world of PS5 game Chronoscript: The Endless End

by admin September 24, 2025

One of the surprise announcements during Sony’s State of Play presentation today was the debut of a literary-themed game titled Chronoscript: The Endless End. It’s an action-adventure game with a very cool hand-drawn art aesthetic. Players will navigate the 3-dimensional world of a mysterious manor as well as the 2-dimensional world of illustrated manuscript pages.

The trailer mostly focused on those 2D sections, showing combat and platforming and seriously did I mention the very cool hand-drawn art? I would have been interested in this for the visuals alone, but throw in a story about writers and editors and I’m hooked.

Perhaps fittingly for this writerly endeavor, the game’s publisher is Shueisha, which is a heavyweight in publishing manga, including the popular Shonen Jump. The developer is DeskWorks, and the studio’s last project also boasted a lovely, illustrative style. We’ll have a little longer to wait before we can dive into the inky world of Chronoscript, however, because this game isn’t expected to arrive on the PlayStation 5 until some time in 2026.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Endless Legend 2’s demo had its critics – here’s how Amplitude are changing the early access build in response

by admin September 20, 2025

I confess, after reading the comments on yesterday’s Endless Legend 2 early access impressions, I am mortally afeared that I’m one of those accursed “positive outliers” I keep reading about in the Gamer Witchfinder Almanac. Seemingly, a fair portion of you were turned off by the recent Steam demo. You may be interested, then, to read specifics about how Amplitude have changed the game in response to demo feedback.

As detailed in a new Steam post, here’s what they think you liked. Firstly, the Tidefall mechanic, whereby the ocean retreats periodically to reveal extra playable terrain, and the regular Monsoons that sweep the land. “This was a core element of the game, and we were happy to see it having a real impact,” the devs write, adding that they tinkered a lot with the quantity of Monsoons and Tidefalls. Apparently, there were once eight smaller Tidefalls to every game of Endless Legend 2, so many that players began ignoring them.

They also reckon you’re keen on the asymmetrical faction design – “always a focus of Amplitude” – and that you’re mostly enjoying the art and sound, including the map design, characters and jingles for stuff like minor factions, or the weird echoey thudding you might hear during Monsoons.

Now for weaknesses. According to Amplitude, the bulk of the negative feedback concerned the user interface. “A quarter of reviews mentioned UI and only 30% of those comments were positive,” they note. “In reading all your feedback we realize it’s not as simple as making a few changes and we are looking at something larger. There are instances where we displayed the wrong or not enough information. There were UI and text bugs to fix and we think more is needed here, which will take some time.”

In particular, they’re looking at making the city screens more intelligible. “Adjacency, leveling districts, managing population, and having clear decisions on what to build next were all muddy,” the devs write. This is a “flow issue”, apparently, which I guess refers to how your eyeballs and attention move from one UI element to the next in the course of urban management.

Amongst other things, they might change up Districts so that you can select them from a construction list like Improvements, rather than picking a tile to build on first. “This will take time to change and won’t be in the initial Early Access, but we will be sharing concepts with you to get feedback,” the devs comment.

To belatedly update my impressions from yesterday, I haven’t had much of a problem with the UI in the early access build, but there were definitely a couple of moments this week when the verdant tile designs made it hard to discern, say, city centres, or units inside cities. It’s definitely rather busy, which is to be expected for a 4X strategy game with such florid factions and a turbulent expanding map. I also sometimes forgot what right-click and left-click do in different contexts. I don’t consider any of these deal-breakers, however.

Following on from those UI thoughts, Amplitude acknowledge that some players have found the colourful world a little too hallucinogenic. They’ve addressed this in early access by making city foundations clearer, so you know to build there, while getting rid of bugs (not the Necrophage) that caused blurriness, and adding more graphics options. They’ve also reduced the colour saturation of the terrain a little and made the all-important hexagonal grid lines more prominent, while shrinking certain fancier vegetation that players kept confusing with Anomalies.

“It’s a difficult balance between providing a lush, detailed world where you can see the leaves blow in the wind during monsoon, and still not have to strain or be confused when trying to see information you need to play,” the developers observe.

In my impressions of Endless Legend 2, I was most critical of the character writing. Demo players were also iffy about this side of the game. In their Steam post, Amplitude note that there are many more words in Endless Legend 2 than the 2014 original, including reams of character dialogue. “We want heroes to feel personal and deep,” they write. “They may be members of your council, have their own friends and enemies, and they talk directly to you and each other. But this additional granularity also came with issues.

“For Early Access we have updated the presentation of the dialog, we are cutting lines and events to focus on only the best and most suitable,” the devs continue. “In some cases, the wrong character would say something, or a character it didn’t make sense for, which we are fixing.” I definitely picked up on a few instances of the latter, but my overarching problem with the character writing is that the focus on characters doesn’t do certain factions justice. The Necrophage are a horde, not a cast. The Aspect are a reef, not an ensemble. That’s what I find attractive about them conceptually, at least.

Endless Legend 2 launches into early access on 22nd September. It’ll start off with five factions. They’re planning to add a sixth plus multiplayer and custom faction support before the 1.0 release next year. If you end up disliking it please don’t burn my house down.

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September 20, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Hollow Knight: Silksong player melts its hardest bosses with an endless fountain of tools: ‘I think I unlocked easy mode’

by admin September 16, 2025

The Strongest Build in SILKSONG [SPOILER FREE] Architect Crest Silkshot Railgun Silksong Build – YouTube

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I’ll admit, I wasn’t as creative with my build in Hollow Knight: Silksong as I’d like to admit. I found one of the early weapon upgrades and kind of stuck with that for the next 30 hours.

It got the job done, but it was nowhere close to the power of YouTuber Syrobe’s “easy mode” build where you have an endless supply of powerful tools. Before I explain how it works though, you should know that it requires fairly late-game unlocks to put together. I’d wait until you’re several hours into Act 2 before attempting this.

The heart of the build is the Architect Crest which has the unique ability to repair your tools on the fly. Normally, you have to rest at a bench to do that, but this Crest gives you the option to forgo healing yourself to replenish your tools in the middle of combat.

Tools are extremely powerful in Silksong and no other Crest lets you spam them like this one. The only drawback is that you can’t equip any of Hornet’s high-damage skills with it, but the amount of tools you can fling out more than makes up for it.

You can pretty much equip any tools you want, but Syrobe recommends the Tacks, Silkshot, and the Voltvessels. He adds in the Pollip Pouch so every hit applies a poison DoT on enemies and Quick Sling to double the amount of tools you throw at a time.

Nothing in the game can survive you laying traps all over the place and shooting everything down with buckets of laser beams and silk bullets. Bosses run into them and get ripped apart while you sit back and watch. Watching Syrobe tear through waves of enemies in seconds looks like he has cheats on.

He has a separate, spoilery video where he melts the last two bosses in the game in under a minute. Both fights took me much longer because I spent most of them dodging around and hitting the boss with my little sword.

Acquiring all the stuff might take you a while. Syrobe goes into detail on where to track it all down, but here’s a quick list of what you need and where to get it:

Architect Crest – Buy the Architect’s Key and unlock a room in the Underworks
Quick Sling – Found behind a false ceiling in Bilewater
Pollip Pouch – Complete the Rite of the Pollip quest in the Wormways
Tacks – Complete the Roach Guts quest in Sinner’s Road
Silkshot – Bring the Ruined Tool from Bilewater to the top of Mount Fay
Voltvessels – Found in northeastern Memorium

“I think I unlocked easy mode, I don’t know what everyone else is doing,” Syrobe said after humiliating one of the final bosses with a room full of traps. Here he is casually watching a boss get shredded while I remember each and every attempt I made in my own playthrough where I—a fool—chased the boss around with my sword. If only I had known about the devastating power of tools.

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September 16, 2025 0 comments

Nightreign characters look out at a castle.

Game Reviews

Elden Ring Nightreign Endless Mode Finds New Way To Punish Fans

by admin August 28, 2025

Revealed weeks ago in a datamine, Elden Ring: Nightreign publisher Bandai Namco has officially confirmed a new endgame difficulty mode coming to the multiplayer roguelite next month. Deep of Night features new relics, randomized challenges, and an endless mode for those able to reach it.

“‘Deep of Night’ is a high-difficulty challenge mode designed for seasoned players who have navigated through the Night many times,” the publisher writes in a new blog post. The mode arrives on September 10 during the game’s usual update time and changes up the usual Nightreign run in a few ways. Players won’t be able to select the Nightlord they face or which Shifting Earth event is active, and enemies will all be stronger.

The “high-difficulty mode” is separated by various depths. Depth 1 is the easiest. Depths 2 and 3 are harder. Depths 4 and 5, meanwhile, feature an “endless battle for those seeking even greater thrills” so you can just play until you die. A skill-based matchmaking system will rank players and group them accordingly. Plus, new Relics and additional Vessel slots will give players more buildcrafting opportunities.

What does Nightreign change in Deep of Night?

The most challenging bit of Deep of Night might not be the boss fights either. Players who have already been exploring the mode early, thanks to mods, have found that the Night’s Tide storm, which slowly engulfs the map, does more damage. And that’s even before players suffer from a new debuff exclusive to gear discovered in the Deep of Night mode, which makes players more susceptible to the toxic rainfall. The rarest loot players pick up can come with other drawbacks as well to make surviving that much harder.

For now, players have two more weeks to try and beat any Everdark Sovereigns that are still on their to-do list. For many, that’s probably Libra, a fight that’s equal parts clever and chaotic. Fans have also already discovered clues for additional upcoming Nightreign content in the form of new subclasses. It’s unclear if those will be part of another free update or paid DLC in the future. There’s still so much of Elden Ring that could be repurposed into new content for the multiplayer spin-off.

One thing that I’d love to see FromSoftware do, and which presumably wouldn’t cost any extra money, is just flip a switch to make all of Nightreign‘s random events spawn more frequently. Some players have spent 100 hours in the game and still only encountered them once or twice.

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August 28, 2025 0 comments

Elden Ring: Nightreign Deep of Night screenshot

Gaming Gear

Elden Ring: Nightreign is getting a new ‘high difficulty mode’ in September, including an ‘endless battle for those seeking even greater thrills’

by admin August 28, 2025

Back in 2024, as the soulslike difficulty discourse once again reared its silly head, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said FromSoft “could just crank the difficulty down,” but warned that doing so “would break the game itself.” That doesn’t seem to be a concern going the other direction, though, as Bandai Namco says a new “high-difficulty challenge mode” called Deep of Night is coming to Elden Ring: Nightreign in September.

Now, before we get too far into this, I know, Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Nightreign are two very different experiences: One an almost entirely solo soulslike, the other a co-op focused extraction game. So the analogy isn’t exact—difficulty becomes less of a pressing issue when you’re travelling with your own personal Let Me Solo Her—but even so I find the whole “We can’t go down, but we can sure as hell go up” approach quite funny.

Anyway, Deep of Night is “designed for seasoned players who have navigated through the Night many times,” Bandai said. Enemies will be stronger than in other modes, and players won’t be able to target specific Nightlords when they set out—you’ll get who you get, and good luck to you.

“Ongoing terrain changes are not reflected,” Bandai said, which I assume means Shifting Earth modifiers are off the table, and there will be new items exclusive to the Deep of Night mode, including “Depths Relics” and weapons with multiple new—”but also detrimental”—effects. Hey, the Nightlord giveth, and the Nightlord taketh away.

“‘Deep of Night’ is a high-difficulty mode that provides a thrilling and challenging adventure,” Bandai wrote. “We encourage you to try and see if you can surpass Depth 3.” If you do, Depths 4 and 5 “will feature an endless battle for those seeking even greater thrills.” Deep of Night’s difficulty will increase as you descend, but will also “fluctuate based on wins and losses,” Bandai said.

If all of this is ringing a bell, it’s likely because you read about some Nightreign datamining earlier this month that uncovered information on the Deep of Night mode, including that it will have five “depths,” each with 999 ratings—a system seemingly similar to the one FromSoft used for Armor Core 6.

How exactly it will all work out in practice remains to be seen, but players will find out soon enough: Nightreign’s Deep of Night mode is set to go live on September 11.

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August 28, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Elden Ring Nightreign’s Deep Of Night Is An Endless “High-Difficulty Expedition Mode” Coming Next Month

by admin August 28, 2025

Since launching in May, Elden Ring Nightreign, the multiplayer roguelike spinoff of Elden Ring, has continued to receive updates introducing new bosses and more. Now, developer From Software has announced the game’s biggest update yet – Deep of Night – will go live next month on Thursday, September 11.

Deep of Night is a “high-difficulty” Expedition challenge mode “designed for seasoned players who have navigated through the Night many times,” the studio writes in a press release, suggesting this already-difficult game is going to get a lot harder soon. In Deep of Night, the enemies are stronger than usual. Plus, you cannot specify the target Nightlord for the Expedition, meaning the final boss of the run will be random.

Alongside this, From Software says ongoing terrain changes will not be reflected, and that special items such as “Depth Relics,” which are exclusive to Deep of Night, and weapons with multiple additional but also detrimental effects, will appear on runs. Furthermore, the difficulty increases the deeper you descend, and “the ratings will fluctuate based on wins and losses, affecting the depth.”

From Software says players should aim to surpass Depth 3, and notes that Depth 4 to Depth 5 will “feature an endless battle for those seeking even greater thrills,” suggesting that Deep of Night can turn into an endless-run mode.

The Deep of Night update for Elden Ring Nightreign goes live on Thursday, September 11.

In the meantime, read Game Informer’s Elden Ring Nightreign review.

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August 28, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Whisper of the House takes the cosy isometric decorating of Unpacking and unleashes it upon an entire town like an ultra-relaxing endless mode

by admin August 21, 2025

Unpacking is one of my favourite videogames, where you grab things out of boxes and neatly pop them around an isometric home. It’s pretty linear though—not a complaint, it needs to be to serve its excellent narrative—but I’ve longed for a similar game with fewer shackles ever since.

Whisper of the House is that exact game, if my time with its demo is anything to go by. It takes the same cosy isometric vibes with wee pixel art decor as Unpacking, but gives me that bit more freedom to decorate however I want.

(Image credit: GD Studio)

Instead of following one character’s life as told through the places they live, Whisper of the House plonks me in a town where I can rearrange both my own space and the spaces of villagers who reside there. I’m first tasked with getting my own place in order, before mail requests come through each morning from folk who want my help moving in.

A wee robot helps me pull items out of a moving box one by one, and I can rotate objects and place them on top of each other—plants that go on shelves, boxes that perch atop refrigerators, plushies that adorn an otherwise plain bedspread. Each location has multiple rooms, but I’m not actually confined to placing the objects inside each one.

Wanna stick a microwave in the hallway? A little weird, but sure thing. You’re the interior designer. Want to keep every photo in one specific location? You can easily bring items between rooms as you please. It’s not quite as tactile as Unpacking—I can’t open every single cupboard and drawer to store things out of sight, which bummed me out a little—but every item is gorgeously crafted with a wee description when you hover over it.

(Image credit: GD Studio)

There are some loose parameters around each villager request. My first job is the dog-loving Luna, and while I’m given free reign across most of her house, her one request is that I create a gallery of photos in her hallway. My second task is a little more out there, requiring me to literally go back in time and help my client clean up his move-in day mess, which I guess makes things better in the future. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but having to tidy up everything scattered across a tiny apartment broke up the standard “grab item from box, place item” pace.

One of my favourite little additions in Whisper of the House, though, is being able to roam around the town and rummage in various dumpsters for trinkets and doodads. I am an absolute clutter fiend in The Sims—if it doesn’t look majorly lived in, I don’t want it—so grabbing random Ramune bottles and snacks to adorn my tiny loft apartment with was a real treat.

Even more furniture can be unlocked through nabbing vouchers by completing tasks or picking them up out in the world and then spending them on decor loot boxes. Normally I’d much prefer to pick and choose items myself, but being given random pieces encouraged me to think outside the box and use items I would have normally condemned to my storage for all eternity.

The demo is pretty short overall, but thankfully it’s not a long wait to dip my toe into the full thing, as Whisper of the House launches on August 27.

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August 21, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Steam Review Scores Are Changing Amid Endless Review-Bombing

by admin August 18, 2025

Valve is overhauling how Steam reviews are displayed in a new update, it announced on Monday. The percentage score usually assigned to games based on the number of positive and negative user reviews will now exclude reviews written in other languages. The change comes as Steam becomes an increasingly popular global PC storefront and routine review-bombing from players in specific regions can torpedo a game’s rating for everyone on the platform.

“Steam’s growth since then into an even larger global presence means customers in different regions of the world may have vastly different experiences from each other for the same game,” Valve explained in a new blog post. “There are a variety of reasons this may happen for a particular game, including translation issues, cultural references, poor network connections, and many others; things that the Overall Review Scores haven’t been able to capture until now. Calculating a language-specific review score means that we can better distill the sentiment of these different groups of customers, and in doing so, better serve potential customers that belong to those groups.”

Not every game will be impacted by the changes. Valve said it will only start calculating “language-specific review scores” for games with at least 2,000 total publicly visible user reviews, and at least 200 written in a particular language. Players can now click through the review score section of a game’s Steam store page to get a breakdown of the scores across different languages. While this will now be the default mode for review scores on Steam, everyone will still have the option to toggle back to the old system.

“We realize that whenever we make changes to User Reviews, we’re inviting some scrutiny into our motivations for making those changes,” Valve wrote. “Maintaining trust in the system is crucial to us, so we’ve erred on the side of being as transparent as possible.”

The move comes just days after one of Steam’s bigger releases of the season, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, implemented controversial changes to the game following apparent pushback from some Chinese fans over historical references in the fictional Soulslike. While it’s unclear if that game factored into this new policy at all, games on Steam increasingly get review-bombed for all sorts of reasons that don’t always necessarily have to do with the underlying functionality or experience, from allegations of using generative AI to complaints of terms of service requirements in places like Europe.

Data from Simon Carless’ Game Discover newsletter earlier this year showed that a plurality of Steam users in 2024 had “simplified Chinese” as their primary language on the platform, followed narrowly by English in second place. Over the summer, Helldivers 2 was briefly review-bombed after an apparent translation error led Chinese players to feel cheated by one of the game’s weekly mission objectives. The latest changes to review scores seem like an attempt by Valve to keep those two audiences separate, at least when it comes to rating new games.

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August 18, 2025 0 comments