Author Archives: Kris Holt

Papers Please but with zombies, a farming-based shoot-’em-up and other new indie games worth checking out

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Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Several neat-looking games arrived this week, we got release dates for several others that I'm really looking forward to and a brand-new Steam festival was announced. 

The Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball is said to be the first Valentine's Day-themed Steam festival. It'll run from February 13 to 20 and feature more than 100 games, including discounts and demos. A showcase will take place on February 13 at 1PM ET on the Sunny Demeanor Games YouTube channel too.

Organizers say the festival includes a wide variety of games about love, including RPGs, puzzle games and (naturally) visual novels. You might play as a cat or someone trying to fish an engagement ring out of a claw machine, as a secret agent or a couple that's run off to another planet. I'm intrigued! There will be some NSFW games involved, for what it's worth.

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check seems like a 3D version of Papers Please but with zombies. At a checkpoint amid a zombie outbreak, your mission is to screen survivors for signs of infection. If you're unsure of their status, you can send an individual to quarantine for further observation or a lab for additional screening. Otherwise, you can let them in or send them to "liquidation." Get things wrong and it could spell disaster, but at least you have a sidearm (and a weaponized drone) to help you deal with sticky situations.

It looks like there's a lot going on in Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, which is from Brigada Games and publisher Devolver Digital. There are base and resource management aspects as well. It's out now on Steam (usually $20, but there's a 10 percent discount until January 26) and PC Game Pass.

Air Hares seems to draw inspiration from classic top-down shoot-'em-ups. But instead of simply blowing up countless ships, your mission is to restore farmland. You'll fire seeds and water to turn barren land into fertile carrot fields. There are still enemies to contend with — you (and perhaps a co-op partner) can dodge and ram them as you try to protect the land. Expect boss battles, too.

I really like the aesthetic here. It has a '90s-style cartoon look (I suddenly really want a modern Bucky O'Hare game). Also, the song from the trailer is going to live in my head for weeks.

Husband-and-wife team Tim and Megan Bungeroth created Air Hares over six years with the help of several contributors. According to a press release, the game is "inspired by the creators’ personal journey with infertility and the idea of creating life rather than destroying it." 

Air Hares is out now on Steam. It typically costs $9, but there's a 20 percent discount until January 28.

Luckshot Games' Big Hops looks like my kind of 3D platformer: joyous and playful. As a young frog who has been kidnapped, you'll try to find airship parts for a raccoon who has promised to help get you home.

There are tons of movement mechanics here, and Hop's tongue plays a major role in those. You can use it to swing across gaps, hookshot your way to higher platforms and solve puzzles. 

Big Hops is out now on Steam, Nintendo Switch and PS5 for $20. The Switch and Steam versions have a 10 percent launch discount until January 19.

Cassette Boy is a pixel-art game that might appear to be a 2D exploration puzzler, but there's more going on here. You can rotate the world to discover new secrets and hide enemies and hazards from view so you can move past them. If you can't see something on your screen, it doesn't exist. There's a bit of a Fez influence here, it would appear.

Wonderland Kazakiri and publisher Pocketpair are behind this one, which I'm looking forward to checking out when I have a chance. Cassette Boy is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S for $13.

I really enjoyed the demo for Aerial_Knight’s DropShot (as well as Aerial_Knight’s previous games). I'm for sure going to be playing the full game when it hits PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Steam and Epic Games Store on February 17.

This is a single-player first-person shooter in which you're skydiving with finger guns. You compete with four enemies to grab the only available parachute as you're falling through the air. Rounds are fast-paced too, generally lasting under a minute.

Point-and-click adventure Earth Must Die has been on my radar for a while and we'll all get a chance to try it soon. It's designed to be a playable cartoon (with a runtime of about eight hours) and it has an art style to match. 

The cast is pretty stellar, with Ben Starr (Final Fantasy XVI, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades II), Joel Fry (Our Flag Means Death) and a whole load of British comedy figures on board. There's a demo available on Steam now and the full game — from Size Five Games and publisher No More Robots — will land on January 27.

Let's wrap things up for this week something very silly-looking from Monster Shop Games. Pie in the Sky is a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-inspired action arcade game in which you play as a magpie that terrorizes bystanders. You can knock people off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ram kids off of scooters, actually go skateboarding and, uh, cause havoc from above. In classic THPS-style, there are hidden areas too. 

This looks like a fun distraction from [gestures at everything]. Pie is the Sky will swoop onto Steam on February 2.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/papers-please-but-with-zombies-a-farming-based-shoot-em-up-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-123000437.html?src=rss

TikTok tightens age verification across Europe

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TikTok is bolstering its age-verification measures across Europe. In the coming weeks, the platform will roll out upgraded age-detection tech in the European Economic Area, as well as in the UK and Switzerland.

The systems will assess the likely age of a user based on their profile information and activity. When the tech flags an account that may belong to a user aged under 13 (the minimum age to use TikTok), a specialist moderator will assess whether it should be banned. TikTok will send users in Europe a notification to tell them about these measures and offer them a chance to learn more.

Also, if a moderator is looking at content for other reasons and thinks an account might belong to an underage user, they can flag it to a specialist for further review. Anyone can report an account they suspect is used by someone under 13 as well. TikTok says it removes about 6 million underage accounts in total from the platform every month.

Those whose accounts are banned can appeal if they think their access was wrongly terminated. Users can then provide a government-approved ID, a credit card authorization or selfie for age estimation (the latter process has not gone well for Roblox as of late, as kids found workarounds for age checks).

TikTok acknowledged that there's no single ideal solution to the issue as things stand. "Despite best efforts, there remains no globally agreed-upon method for effectively confirming a person's age in a way that also preserves their privacy," it stated in a blog post. "At TikTok, we're committed to keeping children under the age of 13 off our platform, providing teens with age-appropriate experiences and continuing to assess and implement a range of solutions. We believe that a multi-layered approach to age assurance — one in which multiple techniques are used — is essential to protecting teens and upholding safety-by-design principles."

TikTok is rolling out these practices after a pilot in Europe over the last year. That project helped the platform to identify and remove thousands more underage accounts. It worked with the Data Protection Commission (its main privacy regulator in the EU) to help ensure it complied with the bloc’s strict data protection standards.

These measures are coming into force amid intensifying calls to keep kids off social media. A social media ban for under 16s in Australia went into effect last month. Affected platforms have collectively closed or restricted millions of accounts as a result. Reddit has filed a lawsuit over the ban. 

A similar ban might be on the cards in the UK amid public pressure and cross-party support. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said "all options are on the table" and that he was watching "what is happening in Australia."

The House of Lords is set to vote on proposals for an under-16 social media ban next week. If an amendment passes, members of parliament will hold a binding vote on the matter in the coming months.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/tiktok-tightens-age-verification-across-europe-130000847.html?src=rss

007 First Light dev admits it messed up PC specs announcement

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IO Interactive raised a few eyebrows last week when it announced the minimum and recommended PC specs for 007 First Light. To run the James Bond adventure at in 1080p at 60 fps, IOI initially said you'd need to have a rig with at least 32GB of RAM and a GPU with 12GB of VRAM. The studio has now revised those numbers and other elements of the specs after "the community flagged some inconsistencies in an earlier version of the listing."

The developer blamed an "internal miscommunication" which led to it sharing an older version of the specs. One of the recommended GPUs in the original version was an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which has 8GB of VRAM — not enough to meet the supposed recommended VRAM settings. 

It seems a little odd to think that it took IOI over a week and an enormous pile of negative press and online reaction before addressing the inconsistency (not to mention the demand for 32GB of RAM for relatively modest 1080p, 60 fps performance). The studio says it updated the specs after "a thorough re-examination and additional testing."

In the recommended hardware section of the latest version, IOI revised down the VRAM from 12GB to 8GB and it halved the RAM requirement to 16GB. IOI also "fixed" the minimum CPU info. The original specs stipulated that gamers would need at least an Intel Core i5 9500K or AMD Ryzen 5 3500. The former has now been revised down to an Intel Core i5 9500K.

For the tape, then, the minimum PC specs to run 007 First Light with a performance target of 1080p at 30 fps are:

  • Processor: Intel Core I5 9500, AMD Ryzen 5 3500

  • Memory: 16GB RAM

  • Video RAM: 6GB

  • Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, AMD RX 5700 or Intel Discrete GPU equivalent

And the recommended specs for a performance target of 1080p at 60 fps are:

  • Processor: Intel Core I5 13500, AMD Ryzen 5 7600

  • Memory: 16GM RAM

  • Video RAM: 8GB

  • Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, AMD RX 6700 XT or Intel Discrete GPU equivalent

The required operating system is the same on both counts with a 64-bit version of Windows 10 or 11. The storage space needed is also the same at 80GB. 

IOI apologized for "the confusion” it caused with the mixup. It promised to share more details about 007 First Light ahead of the game's arrival on May 27 — including details of additional performance targets. Given the way RAM and GPU prices are going, here's hoping IOI isn't looking for too much more to run the game at 1440p or 4K at a decent framerate.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/007-first-light-dev-admits-it-messed-up-pc-specs-announcement-143000670.html?src=rss

OpenAI quietly rolls out a dedicated ChatGPT translation tool

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OpenAI has debuted a dedicated ChatGPT-powered translation tool. While folks have been using the main chatbot for translation for some time, you can now find ChatGPT Translate on its own webpage, as Android Authority spotted. 

The tool can translate text, voice inputs and images into more than 50 languages in seconds, OpenAI says. There’s an automatic language detection function too.

Most interestingly, ChatGPT Translate can rewrite the output to take various contexts and tones into account, much in the same way that more general text-generating AI tools can do. With a single tap, it can rewrite the translation into something "more fluent," for a business formal audience, to make it more child-friendly or for academic purposes. The tool’s webpage says ChatGPT Translate understands "tone, idioms and context."

While those tone and context considerations are intriguing, ChatGPT Translate is a little underbaked compared with the likes of Google Translate — which has been around for decades and just got its own Gemini-based makeover with better support for understanding idioms and slang. The desktop version of ChatGPT Translate does not yet allow for voice inputs, though the mobile one does, as Android Authority notes. Despite claims that ChatGPT can translate text in an image, there’s currently no way to upload one to the tool. There’s no website, document or handwriting translation support as yet either. 

Perhaps most crucially, ChatGPT Translate lives on a webpage right now and there’s no dedicated app. So using it offline appears to be out of the question as things stand. No app with on-device translation support could make ChatGPT Translate a no-go for travelers in rural areas with no Internet access. There’s no support for translating real-time conversations as yet either. Google’s Pixel 10, on the other hand, now supports voice translations for calls.

It’s not exactly clear when ChatGPT Translate debuted — it arrived with zero fanfare from OpenAI. There’s a snapshot of the webpage from November on The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine that looks just like the current one, but that may have simply been a case of OpenAI testing a live version of the tool. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-quietly-rolls-out-a-dedicated-chatgpt-translation-tool-133000974.html?src=rss

YouTube adds more parental controls, including a way to block teens from watching Shorts

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YouTube is rolling out some additional parental controls, including a way to set time limits for viewing Shorts on teen accounts. In the near future, parents and guardians will be able to set the Shorts timer to zero on supervised accounts. "This is an industry-first feature that puts parents firmly in control of the amount of short-form content their kids watch," Jennifer Flannery O'Connor, YouTube's vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post. Along with that, take-a-break and bedtime reminders are now enabled by default for users aged 13-17. 

The platform is also bringing in new principles, under which it will recommend more age-appropriate and "enriching" videos to teens. For instance, YouTube will suggest videos from the likes of Khan Academy, CrashCourse and TED-Ed to them more often. It said it developed these principles (and a guide for creators to make teen-friendly videos) with help from its youth advisory committee, the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA, the American Psychological Association, the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and other organizations.

Moreover, an updated sign-up process for kid accounts will be available in the coming weeks. Kid accounts are tied to parental ones, and don't have their own associated email address or a password. YouTube says users will be able to switch between accounts in the mobile app with just a few taps. "This makes it easier to ensure that everyone in the family is in the right viewing experience with the content settings and recommendations of age-appropriate content they actually want to watch," O'Connor wrote.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-adds-more-parental-controls-including-a-way-to-block-teens-from-watching-shorts-151329673.html?src=rss

NVIDIA rolls out DLSS 4.5 to all RTX GPUs

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Just a week after announcing the latest version of its image-upscaling tech at CES, NVIDIA is rolling out DLSS 4.5. The company released a beta version of the update last week. Starting today, all NVIDIA app users with a GeForce RTX GPU will be able to upgrade to the full release of DLSS 4.5.

NVIDIA says DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution (to give its full name) delivers sharper visuals and improved temporal stability. The 2nd Generation Super Resolution Transformer reduces ghosting and improves anti-aliasing in more than 400 games and apps, the company claims. "This second-generation model is our most sophisticated yet, utilizing five times the compute power of the original transformer model, having been trained on a significantly expanded, high-fidelity dataset," NVIDIA added.

The company plans to bring an upgraded frame generation feature to DLSS 4.5 sometime this spring for those with GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. It says the Dynamic 6x Frame Generation feature can generate up to five extra frames for each traditionally generated one, delivering up to 4K 240Hz path traced performance.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nvidia-rolls-out-dlss-45-to-all-rtx-gpus-140000322.html?src=rss

UK scraps digital ID requirement for workers

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The UK government has backtracked on a plan to require all workers to have a digital ID following a backlash. It will no longer be mandatory to register with the digital ID program to prove one has the right to work in the country, as the BBC reports.

The government announced the now-scrapped digital ID requirement in September. "You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID," Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said at the time. "It's as simple as that." 

The government still plans to fully transition to digital right-to-work checks by 2029, using the likes of biometric passports, as it seeks to do away with paper-based systems. Those are "open to fraud and abuse," a government spokesperson said. 

Officials have still not explained exactly how the digital ID program will work. The government originally framed digital IDs as a way to make it easier to identify immigrants who are working in the country without having the legal right to do so. It is now said to be focusing more on pressing home the message that digital IDs will help people access public services. 

A service called One Login will be part of the digital ID system — this currently can be used for things like applying for a veteran card and canceling a lost passport. More than 12 million people have signed up so far. Another service called Wallet will let people store their digital ID on their phone. This would contain their name, date of birth, nationality, residence status and a photo.

Almost 3 million people signed an official parliamentary petition to protest the introduction of digital IDs. "We think this would be a step towards mass surveillance and digital control, and that no one should be forced to register with a state-controlled ID system," the petition states. "We oppose the creation of any national ID system."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/uk-scraps-digital-id-requirement-for-workers-105740207.html?src=rss

Apple bundles creative apps such as Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro into a single subscription

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Apple has been putting more onus on its services for the past several years — the company makes tens of billions of dollars in revenue from that side of the business, which it claimed had a record year in 2025. Apple is nudging a little more in that direction with a new subscription bundle called Apple Creator Studio.

This allows creators to pay a single fee ($13 per month or $129 per year) to use Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage. Subscribers will get access to “premium content” in Pages, Keynote and Numbers (as well as in Freeform later this year). Of course, there are AI features too. Apple Creator Studio will be available starting on January 28 and you can try it out at no cost through a one-month free trial.

College students and educators can subscribe to Apple Creator Studio for $3 per month or $30 per year. Up to six people can access all of the plan’s features if one person in a Family Sharing group subscribes.

Apple noted that Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage will still be available as one-time purchases for Mac through the Mac App Store. Given that those can be pretty pricy (going up to $300 for Final Cut Pro), the subscription could be enticing to many burgeoning creators.

This seems like Apple’s attempt to muscle in on Adobe’s territory, especially now that it’s bringing AI features to many of these apps. Adding new features to productivity apps like Numbers and Keynote means Apple’s taking a shot at the likes of Microsoft 365 Copilot (yeeeeah, that’s what Office is called now) and Google Workspace as well.

On Mac and iPad, Final Cut Pro has a new feature called Beat Detection. Apple suggests this makes “editing video to the rhythm of music fast and fun.” It uses an AI model from Logic Pro to analyze music tracks and display a Beat Grid. The idea here is to visualize song parts, beats and bars to help editors align their cuts with the music.

The Montage Maker tool in Final Cut Pro on an iPad.
The Montage Maker tool in Final Cut Pro on an iPad.
Apple

An AI-powered Montage Maker tool can stitch together “a dynamic video based on the best visual moments within the footage.” You’ll be able to tweak these montages and use an Auto Crop tool to reframe the clip into a vertical format to make it a better fit for social media. Final Cut Pro has transcript and visual search functions too.

Logic Pro, MainStage, Pixelmator Pro (which is coming to iPad with Apple Pencil support) and Motion will all have AI-powered features as well. As you might expect, you’ll need an Apple Intelligence-capable device to use some of these.

Apple is also introducing something called the Content Hub. This media library includes “curated, high-quality photos, graphics and illustrations.”

As for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, you’ll be able to access premium templates and themes in those otherwise-free apps with a Apple Creator Studio plan. Subscribers will be able to try beta versions of new features, such as a way to generate a draft of a Keynote presentation text based on an outline, and a Magic Fill tool to generate formulas and fill in tables in Numbers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-bundles-creative-apps-such-as-final-cut-pro-and-logic-pro-into-a-single-subscription-145210038.html?src=rss

Star Wars Outlaws developer Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm face layoffs

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We aren't even two weeks into the new year and Ubisoft is already looking to carry out its second round of layoffs in 2026. The company has informed workers at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm of a "proposed organizational restructure" that could affect around 55 roles across its two Swedish studios. Workers at Massive (the developer of The Division series, Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora) were offered voluntary buyouts late last year as part of Ubisoft's ongoing cost-cutting efforts.

"This restructure follows the completion of the Voluntary Leave Program launched during the fall of 2025, a finalized long-term roadmap and a completed staffing and appointment process, which together have provided clearer visibility into the structure and capacity required to support the two studios’ work and sustainably over time," Ubisoft told IGN in a statement. "These proposed changes are forward-looking and structural, they are not related to individual performance, recent deliveries or the quality of the work produced by the teams."

Ubisoft claims that the "long-term direction for the studios remains unchanged." Massive will continue working on projects that include The Division 3. Ubisoft Stockholm, meanwhile, is beavering away on a new franchise that's still under wraps for now. That project is harnessing the studio's Ubisoft Scalar cloud computing tech, according to Game Developer.

Earlier in January, the company said it was shutting down Ubisoft Halifax, resulting in the loss of 71 jobs. Workers at that studio unionized just 16 days earlier. Ubisoft said its decision was part of "company-wide actions to streamline operations."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/star-wars-outlaws-developer-massive-entertainment-and-ubisoft-stockholm-face-layoffs-134234968.html?src=rss

A Resident Evil showcase is taking place on January 15

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Resident Evil Requiem, the first new mainline entry in the series since 2021’s Resident Evil Village, is just over a month away and Capcom is ready to share more details. The publisher will air a Resident Evil Showcase on January 15 at 5PM ET. You’ll be able to watch it on Twitch and YouTube (in English and Japanese).

The stream will run for around 12 minutes. It will feature “all the latest info on Resident Evil Requiem,” which will almost certainly include some gameplay ahead of it hitting PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam on February 27. Capcom might have more in store, though. An announcement for the showcase on the Resident Evil website states that, “Some of the games included in the show aren't suitable for children.”

That suggests the company will share details about other RE titles. It may just be a case of Capcom offering a reminder that it’s also bringing ports of Resident Evil 7 and Village to Switch 2 on February 27. Still, there’s a chance we’ll hear news of more ports. There’s also the possibility that we get a glimpse of the next Resident Evil movie, a reboot of the series from Barbarian and Weapons filmmaker Zack Cregger that’s set to hit theaters in September. 


This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-resident-evil-showcase-is-taking-place-on-january-15-133000548.html?src=rss