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If Elden Ring Nightreign wasn't punishing enough for you, FromSoft is adding a high-difficulty mode
Game Updates

FromSoftware unveils Elden Ring Nightreign’s new mode ahead of release tomorrow

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FromSoftware has unveiled its new Deep of Night mode for Elden Ring Nightreign, ahead of its release tomorrow, 11th September.


As revealed last week, this mode adds extra challenge to the multiplayer spin-off game. The world of Limveld will be full of deadlier enemies and Nightlords won’t be selectable, as in the main game. Instead, players will traverse multiple depths, with escalating difficulty and challenges.


Players will have access to stronger weapons, gained by defeating more powerful variants of enemies and minibosses. However, some of these will have detrimental effects as well as bonuses, so strategy will be required. A new load of relics will also be available, in addition to expanded slots.

ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN | Deep of Night Overview TrailerWatch on YouTube

Everdark Sovereigns – the more difficult alternative Nightlords – may also appear to ruin your run.


In short, this feels like the sort of mode Nightreign players have been craving! And it’s further evidence of FromSoftware continuing to evolve its formula further post-release, following the addition of a two player mode.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.



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Co-op climber Peak gets colourblind mode and more
Game Reviews

Co-op climber Peak gets colourblind mode and more

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There is a new patch for co-op climbing caper Peak, which adds a colour blindness mode as well as a number of fixes and balance tweaks.

The colour blindness mode, which has long been requested by the Peak community, adds patterns to the game’s different coloured berries. This, the developer says, will help “further differentiate them”, and make the berries more readily able to be told apart.

On the balance side of things, the Peak team has among other things made Nest Eggs heavier.

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You can check out the latest patch notes for Peak below:

Features

  • Colour Blindness Mode! This adds patterns to differently-colored berries to further differentiate them.

Balance

  • Reduced the maximum time before the first tornado can spawn.
  • Slightly increased the minimum time before a tornado can spawn again.
  • Slightly reduced the commonness of the “Tornado Hell” biome variant,
  • It is now wayyy less likely that the maze is blocked after entering the TOMB.
  • Nest Eggs now weigh more to match the weight of the Egg inside.

Major fixes

  • Fixed an issue where players would be unable to obtain the Endurance Badge!
  • Fixed an issue where The Scoutmaster couldn’t climb walls. This went unnoticed for a while because he can jump pretty high, but now he should be even scarier.
  • Fixed an issue where Scrolls and Berrynanas and other objects that change form when used would drop the new item instead of putting it in your hands.
  • Fixed a potential issue where playing a vanilla game after previously having visual mods installed (or playing with a modded player while not having their same mods installed) could cause a variety of visual and functionality issues. This could include, but was not limited to, players permanently showing up as a default skin in the endgame screen even if not wearing modded cosmetics, as well as the endgame report breaking entirely and preventing certain achievements from being obtained.
  • Fixed an issue where, rarely, getting caught in a tornado would cause the game to freeze on the loading screen upon failing a run.
  • We gave the backpack new physics that should prevent more cases where people would lose their backpack.

Minor fixes

  • Fixed an issue where the Magic Bugle and Scoutmaster’s Bugle play at a strangely low volume. (its not too loud now I promise)
  • The Guidebook renders at a higher resolution if you set the Render Scale to low.
  • Fixed an issue where placing a Scout Cannon atop a jellyfish could cause a softlock.
  • A missing treetop has been added to a branch on the giant tree.
  • Removed the annoying flicker on the end game countdown.
  • Removed Scoutmaster grain effect in Photosensitive Mode.
  • Rainbow stamina bar is now slower in Photosensitive Mode.
  • Fixed an issue where it said “Move” instead of “Interact” on a prompt in the Controls page.

Image credit: Team PEAK

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.



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Silksong Silver Bell quest location
Product Reviews

Silksong Easter egg hides a secret, super-hard permadeath mode, for those who want to suffer even more

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Hollow Knight: Silksong will get a little easier next week with the release of the game’s first patch, which among other things promises a “slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter.” But what if, for some demented reason, you wanted to make the game harder? As it turns out, that’s on the menu too, and you don’t even have to wait for it.

Steel Soul mode is a permadeath mode that becomes available in the original Hollow Knight after completing the game for the first time, and it does indeed make the game more difficult: Just as in real life, death is not a condition from which one can recover. Steel Soul mode is also present in Silksong, revealed by the presence of the Steel Soul achievement on Steam.

But as discovered by redditor Buttnugtaster—man, I love quoting redditors in news stories—the Steel Soul mode in Silksong is not restricted to replays. By going to the “Extras” menu and entering Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right on your controller, you can unlock the Steel Soul mode immediately.


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Why would you want to do that to yourself? Look, people ask me the same question about picking digital mushrooms in a virtual forest. Everyone has their thing and it’s best not to judge.

CHEAT CODE DISCOVERY (Not joke) from r/Silksong

I’m sure it’s not gone overlooked, but this unlock, minus a couple button presses, comes by way of the Konami code, a cheat code created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto in 1985 to assist with game development that subsequently broke containment and appeared in numerous other games over the years. All due respect to IDDQD die-hards, but the Konami code is far and away the most famous cheat code in videogame history, and its use in this little Easter egg is a nice touch.

For the record, I tested this myself, and yup, it works. I fired up Silksong, went straight to the “Extras” menu, bashed in the code, the screen flashed and gave me a bit of a boooosh sound, and Steel Soul was then available when starting a new game.

I can also confirm that while the Konami code is traditionally applied with a controller, it works just as well in Silksong with a keyboard.

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

So there you have it: If you want to dive straight into Silksong’s permadeath mode, the option is now on the table. Some folks—not many, but a few—have already pulled it off:

(Image credit: Steam)

As mentioned, if all of this sounds like masochistic nonsense and you would really prefer to suffer less rather than more, that’s on the way too: Silksong’s first patch is expected to go live next week, but you can see what’s cooking now through public beta branches available on Steam and GOG.



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Product Reviews

Google expands AI Mode beyond English for the first time

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Google is opening up AI Mode to more languages. Starting today, the AI chatbot the company is integrating into Google Search is available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese.

The company has been rapidly expanding access to the search experience. In May, Google started offering it to everyone in the US (and later the UK and India) after starting public tests just two months earlier.

Google added more features to AI Mode in July, including support for the Gemini 2.5 Pro model and Deep Search. As of last month, AI Mode has been present in more than 180 countries. But until now, AI Mode had only been available in English. This is the first language support expansion for the chatbot.

“Building a truly global Search goes far beyond translation — it requires a nuanced understanding of local information,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s vice president of search product management wrote in a blog post. “With the advanced multimodal and reasoning capabilities of our custom version of Gemini 2.5 in Search, we’ve made huge strides in language understanding, so our most advanced AI search capabilities are locally relevant and useful in each new language we support.”

Google has been claiming recently that traffic to websites from Search is “relatively stable” since the rollout of AI Overviews and that “the web is thriving.” However, the company admitted something very different in a court filing last week. Its lawyers stated that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” That, plus the expansion of AI Mode, will surely be welcomed with open arms by publishers who are seriously feeling the pinch of declining web traffic.



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Windows Galaxy Brain
Gaming Gear

Upcoming PowerToys utility will finally let you set light and dark mode to cycle on a schedule in Windows 11

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I swear, sometimes the only thing that actually wakes me up in the morning—besides enough caffeine to kill a small horse—is the retina searing brightness of a rogue default theme, usually from that one app I keep meaning to switch to dark mode. Now an upcoming PowerToys utility means I won’t be jumpscared with a bright white blast to my eyeballs right before bed time.

For those unfamiliar, PowerToys is a Windows utility for those never content with a system default. Tucked away into the accompanying blog post for the PowerToys 0.94 update (via Windows Latest) is news of a feature in the works that will “automatically switch between light and dark mode based on your schedule.”

At present in Windows 11, you can select dark mode by ducking into settings, then looking under personalisation, and then colours. You can also pick a muted ‘accent’ colour to highlight certain features of the Windows UI—such as sliders and hyperlink text—without harshing the more sedate vibes of dark mode.


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The rest of the recent 0.94 update focuses on quality of life updates, such as adding a search box into the PowerToys settings menu, plus a new gliding cursor mode that offers a little extra support for users who otherwise struggle to make rapid mouse movements and clicks precisely. Keyboard shortcuts also enjoy a tweak; rather than hitting a hotkey and being surprised when multiple things result from the same input, PowerToys now has a new tile that warns you of keyboard shortcut conflicts and also allows you to quickly reassign any doubled-up key combinations.

You can’t currently set your theming to change throughout the day in Windows 11, though that functionality is there for the Night light feature designed to reduce blue light intensity as ambient light levels drop. The PowerTools v0.95 update offering that feature should go live in October. As users have frequently requested this feature in the past (not to mention the fact a similar feature can already be found in macOS), there’s a good chance that the power users won’t be allowed to keep theme scheduling all to themselves forever.

And once we get themes that change based on the time of day, whose to say themes that change based on your location is out of the question either? Just think—dark mode for when you’re reading fanfic about your favourite blorbo at home, and then the normcore glow of day mode for when you’re in the office…though I’m not sure a shifting theme is what I’d personally consider a good enough reason to give up my location data.

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A sniper prepares to fire.
Game Reviews

9-Minutes Of Battlefield 6 Battle Royale Mode Leaks Showing Off Massive Map

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When will Square Enix finally announce the Final Fantasy 9 remaster everyone is convinced exists? Will this month’s rumored Nintendo Direct finally be the big one that gives us a peak at all the big new games the company has planned for Switch 2? And will the new Marathon player test be as leaky as Battlefield 6‘s? Welcome to a special Labor Day edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. I just flew back from PAX West 2025 on a red eye and can’t fall asleep yet so here we go!

Battlefield 6 battle royale leak shows swimming, sledgehammers, and more

Roughly nine minutes of new footage of Battlefield 6 recently leaked showing off more of its battle royale mode. The map looks massive and the gameplay shows swimming and shooting while in the water. There’s also a dual-purpose ladder gizmo and smashing through a concrete wall with a sledgehammer.

Will it be better than Warzone? Will anyone care? “Can’t wait to play 1 single round of this then go back to the real Battlefield and never touch it again,” wrote one fan on Reddit.

September Nintendo Direct rumors intensify

According to podcast host and industry leaker NateTheHate, rumors of a mid-September Nintendo Direct are accurate. “Yes, there is a Nintendo Direct in September,” he posted over the weekend. “When: The second week of the month, in the latter half on or around Sept 11 or 12th.” That’s a week before the previous rumored date.

Where the hell is that Final Fantasy 9 remaster?

Producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida has been a busy man. Alongside getting philosophical about modding in Final Fantasy 14  and opening up PAX West with a story time about how the Mario Bros. arcade game taught him about PVP, he’s also penned a short Q&A celebrating the 25th anniversary of FF9. He’s still not tipping his hand about the long-rumored remaster, but he did confess he’s still searching for the meaning of life just like Vivi.

Fairgames lost its game director

Daniel Drapeau left the PlayStation studio Haven to join Warner Bros. Montreal. It comes a few months after studio manager Jade Raymond left as well amid a reported delay of the multiplayer heist game due to poor internal feedback.

Bungie’s super-secret Marathon test will pay $500

That’s according to emails sent out to some fans, TheGamePost reports. They have to play the sci-fi extraction shooter at least one hour every day for a month. Clearly concerned about leaks, the test will also reportedly take place on Bungie’s internal development servers rather than Steam. Players even have to submit their IP addresses to Bungie for clearance.

ICYMI:

Watch this:

 



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Vampire Survivors
Product Reviews

Vampire Survivors’ free-roaming online mode is available to play in beta now, and there’s an official boardgame coming too

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Vampire Survivors’ long-anticipated online mode is finally here, sort of. Developer Poncle announced at the end of this week that online multiplayer has been implemented in the game’s beta branch.

Vampire Survivors has of course had multiplayer functionality for several years. But playing with pals was previously limited to local co-op. Getting Vampire Survivors to work online has proved quite the challenge, as broken down by the online mode’s developer Coherence in a fascinating blog from April. For example, each of Vampire Survivors’ multitudinous enemies rely on local physics interactions, making it very tricky to make those interactions concurrent across a network.

Online mode brings a few important differences to both regular solo play and local co-op. For starters, players are free to roam around the environment as they please when playing online, rather than being restricted to the screen area as is the case with local play. Moreover, players all level up simultaneously, meaning everyone needs to hit the XP cap before levelling can commence. And if you want to play any of the expansions in online co-op, you’ll all need to own said expansion before that is possible.


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Alongside the online mode’s beta rollout, Poncle also revealed that a Vampire Survivors boardgame is in the works, just in case you want a turn-based version of Vampire Survivors that takes up a load of physical space. Poncle says it has “spent a long time making sure the board game ‘feels’ as much like Vampire Survivors as possible” with features including run-based play where you unlock new stuff, a built-in levelling system and key playable characters from the original game.

(Image credit: Poncle)

Finally, Poncle provided a sneak peek of Vampire Survivors’ next major update, which will introduce two new stages, two new weapons (plus evolutions), a “party mode” that enables solo players to be accompanied by friendly NPCs, and two new playable characters (spoilers follow). One of these rolls a dice every 30 seconds to provide various random bonuses, while the other causes “explosive props” to appear while moving around.

If you want to play Vampire Survivors online, you’ll first need to switch to the appropriate branch within Vampire Survivors’ properties menu on Steam. Fortunately, it’s a pretty straightforward process explained by Poncle in its announcement.

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Space Marine 2's new Techmarine class, Helbrute mode and other update plans detailed in Year 2 video
Game Updates

Space Marine 2’s new Techmarine class, Helbrute mode and other update plans detailed in Year 2 video

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only more bloody downloadable content for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Developers Saber Interactive are supposed to be working on Space Marine 3, but you wouldn’t know that from all the Stuff they’ve jammed into the previous game’s year 2 content schedule. There’s a major Anniversary patch due on 4th September, just in time for Silksong. Five more patches are coming over 2025 and 2026, plus nine DLC packs via season pass. The manufactorums are overflowing! Here’s a video to lay it all out.

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The standout upcoming option is probably the new playable Techmarine class, who don’t get any screentime here. What is a Techmarine? A Space Marine with a lot of spanners where parts of their anatomy should be. They’re good at fixing stuff, though one suspects that, like most Sparse Maureens in Spice Margerine 2, they’ll spend the bulk of their time murdering things.

Techmarines aside, the free updates will add new enemies, bosses, weapons, progression mechanics, PvE stratagems, Eternal War arenas, and operations. Also, the chance to play a Chaos Helbrute, which looks like a berserking tractor with a comically small humanoid head. It’s like Bruce Banner got 90% of the way through Hulking out and ran out of rage. Still, let’s see if you’re still laughing when it stands on your toes in the forthcoming Helbrute Onslaught PvP mode.

Image credit: Focus Entertainment

As for those paid DLCs, there will be the usual shower of cosmetics. The new battle pass kicks off with the Black Templars Champion Pack, which includes a Champion skin for the Bulkwark class and a Power Sword skin. Then there’s the Imperial Fists Cosmetic Pack, which comprises 40 new cosmetics. Future packs will include cosmetics for the Raptors, Iron Hands and Carcharodons. I’m pretty sure they made some of those Space Marine chapters up. Iron Hands, lol, as if.

The only thing missing from Space Marine 2’s roadmap, to my mind, is a mutual crossover with the Helldivers 2 universe – a prospect once dangled by Arrowhead’s CEO, many moons ago. Let us make the commodified fascists fight! Let us see whose space-bigotry is burlier! Arrowhead have already partnered with the goose-stepping Helghast from Killzone. Add Warhammer 40,000’s Space Marines to the mix and you’re basically playing an unofficial PlanetSide 3. Seriously, there’s like, at least six battle passes worth of content here.



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Zombies Return To GTA Online In New, Weirder Survival Mode
Game Reviews

Zombies Return To GTA Online In New, Weirder Survival Mode

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The undead hordes are back in Grand Theft Auto Online, but they aren’t hanging out in a snowy cemetery like in last year’s Halloween event. Instead, zombies have infested the tropical island of Cayo Perico in a new mode that’s bigger and trippier than the last zombie survival mode.

On August 28, Rockstar Games officially announced (and then promptly added) a new zombie survival mode to GTA Online. Titled “Cayo Perico Zombie Survival,” this new mode transports players to the already existing tropical island of Cayo Perico to fight off waves of zombies. During the mode, which can be played solo or with three of your friends, players will encounter a wide array of undead foes, including DJ zombies and undead conquistadors. Remember when this was a gritty online crime simulator set in the same universe as Grand Theft Auto V? Anyway, here’s the trailer for the new mode:

Compared to last year’s Halloween zombies mode, this new Cayo Perico Zombie Survival is much bigger and wilder. Last year’s mode was set in one small snowy cemetery, featured a handful of zombie types, and that was it. This new mode features more enemy variety, moves players around the island to fight the undead in different spots, and just seems like a weirder and bigger thing. I guess last year’s zombie event being a massive success convinced Rockstar Games to invest more money and resources into this new undead survival mode. It sounds like this mode will be leaving on September 10, so don’t wait too long to hop back into GTA Online, earn some new exclusive rewards, and kill a bunch of zombies.

Here’s Rockstar’s official description of the mode:

Your favorite island paradise just came down with a deadly case of party fever. As if a major narcotrafficking island wasn’t dangerous enough, it’s now been overrun by the undead — and maybe it’s the drugs or the tropical climate, but this time they’ve got a whole lot weirder. Cut your way through waves of undead, including conquistadors armed with muskets, Panther Trainers and their feral pets, swarms of Splitters, and more in the new Cayo Perico Survival. Fight through these hordes and make your way to the airstrip — then pray your evacuation plane doesn’t take too long.



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If Elden Ring Nightreign wasn't punishing enough for you, FromSoft is adding a high-difficulty mode
Game Reviews

If Elden Ring Nightreign wasn’t punishing enough for you, FromSoft is adding a high-difficulty mode

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For those of you who enjoyed Elden Ring’s co-op spin-off Nightreign on release but now think meh, this is too easy, well buckle up buttercup. Bandai Namco and FromSoftware have announced a high-difficulty mode.

It’s known as Deep of Night and it’s intended for seasoned players who have navigated through the Night many times, which counts me out.

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Deep of Night will arrive on 11th September and have stronger enemies in it. You won’t be able to specify the Nightlord you want to fight and ongoing terrain changes won’t be reflected.

“Furthermore, the difficulty increases the deeper you descend,” the Nightreign team said. “The ratings will fluctuate based on wins and losses, affecting the ‘depth’.”

There will be some special items exclusive to Deep of Night, but be warned that some “detrimental effects” will also appear. You can find further information via Bandai Namco here.

Image credit: FromSoft

Our Ed described the Elden Ring spinoff as “an exhilarating rush and a celebration of the studio’s prior achievements Souls veterans will devour” in Eurogamer’s Nightreign review. Are you now up for this fresh challenge?

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.



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