PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC; Pieces Interactive
The stars are lost in a swamp of poor writing and buggy combat in this wearisome reimagining of the 1992 survival classic

It’s fitting that this latest Alone in the Dark game should choose a generational curse for its premise, as the series that pioneered the survival horror genre hasn’t been good in about 30 years. Its various misadventures include the disastrous 2008 game of the same name, which among many strange design decisions included a button dedicated to blinking. Yet at least it was terrible in an interesting way, which is more than can be said for this dull and derivative reimagining of the game that started it all.

Set in Louisiana in the early 20th century, Alone in the Dark sees Emily Hartwood (Jodie Comer) visiting her uncle Jeremy at the Derceto Manor convalescence home for mentally ill people after receiving a worrying letter from him. So worrying, in fact, that not only has she hired private detective Edward Carnby (David Harbour) to accompany her, but one of the first questions she asks Carnby is whether he’s brought a gun, as she expects he might have to “wave it around a bit” in order to see her uncle.

Six years since its voyage began, the oceanic co-op is landing on PS5 – and the team behind the game can’t wait to empower the creativity of a whole new community of players

One evening many months ago, Mike Chapman, the creative director of the co-op pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves, sat down to play the game with producer Joe Neate. This wasn’t just a standard playtest – joining them online would be a crew of players they’d never taken to the ocean with before. It was a team from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plan to bring the Xbox exclusive to PS5 had just been hatched; now it was time to get into the detail. “We were educating them about the game, talking through what was special about it,” says Neate. “It was so surreal,” chips in Chapman. “Trying to find treasure on an island with a group from a different platform holder …”

The PS5 launch is scheduled for 30 April, and pre-orders are now open, but it’s only the latest stage in the evolution of this fascinating game. Launched on 20 March 2018, it was the most ambitious project in the long history of veteran British studio Rare. Billed as a cooperative pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves gave players access to a vast multiplayer world of oceanic exploration, buried treasure and ship-to-ship battles. The design philosophy behind the game was simple, yet extremely risky: tools not rules. Players would be given everything they needed to set out on their own pirate adventures – even musical instruments and gallons of virtual grog – but there would be no overarching narrative, no skill trees, no complex character progression systems. The stories would come from the players themselves, as they built their crews and fought other buccaneers for fame and fortune.

PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Visual Concepts/2K
Visual Concepts pulls off an incredible reversal on this formerly beleaguered series, just in time for Wrestlemania’s big 4-0

It’s a storyline worthy of a WWE superstar: washed up, widely ridiculed, apparently on its way to obscurity, WWE 2K20 was video game wrestling’s lowest ebb. Not five years later, presumably having performed all manner of off-screen training montages in meat lockers, the game returns revitalised, with a twinkle in its eye and, much more pertinently, controls that not only function but actually put a smile on your face.

Conceptually, wrestling has always been hard to translate to a game. Why not just keep leathering your opponent in the face until they’re too stunned to resist a pin? Because that makes bad television, and if you hadn’t already guessed by the smell of body oil and hairspray, you’re in the world of sports entertainment here. No, being “good” at WWE 2K24 or its predecessors is about putting on a show. And boy, does it know how to let you do that.

WWE 2K24 is out 8 March; £59.99

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Microsoft’s decision to ease off its 23-year competition with Sony and Nintendo over supremacy in games hardware has opened a path for Japan’s return as the world’s undisputed home of the console.

The prospect of a new, less internationalized era of console wars has raised hopes of happier times for the Japanese survivors but has also caused analysts and investors to revisit the question of how much longer the whole genre of dedicated games machines will continue to exist.

Microsoft head of gaming Phil Spencer last month revealed plans to release what would previously have been exclusively Xbox games for use on rival platforms, as part of a new focus on cloud-based gaming.

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In this week’s newsletter: Sony’s news that it is cutting jobs and cancelling projects for the mega-console underlines a depressing fact about game development – it’s go big, or go home

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I wrote last week about the decades-long console wars between Xbox and PlayStation – and how the Microsoft’s looser attitude to releasing games everywhere people play them, even on rival consoles, might be the beginning of an end to them. Now we have news that Sony is laying off 900 people across its studios all over the world. Why is the maker of the hugely successful PlayStation 5, which has outsold its main rival by three to one, doing something so drastic? It seems that the end of the console wars might come not by choice, but by necessity: the way that the games industry worked in the past is simply not how it works now.

The news that PlayStation would be laying off what amounts 8% of its workforce came via an all-company email from Jim Ryan, the company’s outgoing boss – who, less than a week ago, was pictured celebrating his Sony career at London Studios with many people who now no longer have jobs: the company is closing it entirely, along with cuts at Firesprite, and there will be “reductions in various functions” across the company in the UK. Guerilla Games (makers of the Horizon series), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us) and Insomniac (Marvel’s Spider-Man) are also seeing reductions. At the time of writing, Sony employees at US studios were still waiting to hear how they would be affected. “Please be kind to yourselves and to each other,” the email ends, with almost jaw-dropping irony.

Enlarge / Who doesn't want less recoil? Unless, that is, you're someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 "emulation" device. (credit: Cronus)

The Cronus Zen describes itself as a hardware tool for "universal controller compatibility," letting you plug in a third-party controller, an Xbox controller into a PlayStation, or even your keyboard and mouse into a console. But you can also use its scripting engine to "amplify your game" and set up "GamePacks" to do things like reduce recoil animations in games like Call of Duty. And that is where Cronus seems to have gotten into trouble.

As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5's system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting. The update is "NOT mandatory," Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing. Still, there is "currently no timetable on a fix … it could be 24 (hours), 24 days, 24 months, we won't know until we've dug into it." There is, for now, a " Remote Play Workaround " for those already too far updated.

Ars attempted to reach Cronus for comment and reached out to Sony as well and will update this post with any new information.

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Enlarge / It's the same chip in the PS5 Slim, but there are some changes in where the heat goes. (credit: Dave2D )

You aren't supposed to be able to buy Sony's redesigned PlayStation 5 yet, but because global commerce is just too complicated, some people have already gotten their hands on them. One of those people is YouTube vlogger Dave2D. He gently took apart the unofficially named "Slim," noted the savings in weight, if not so much size, and detailed some intriguing details about the new heat management and detachable disc drive.

Sony has made a smaller, usually slimmer version of each of its PlayStation consoles available as its market matures: the PS2 , PS3 , PS4 , even the PS One , kinda-sorta. Usually there is no question that the newer, smaller version is an all-around better pick. But the newest version of the largest home console in decades isn't a straightforward improvement in efficiency, at least as seen by Dave2D and Linus Tech Tips .

Dave2D's teardown of a PlayStation 5.

The new console is now divided into four panels, and the finish is different between the top and bottom. That's because, on the newer, slimmer PS5 standard edition, the disc drive is now detachable. There are visible screws on the module, but the drive itself connects through a single socket port.

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Enlarge / Sony wants you to make an online check in before using that external drive with your PS5 Slim. (credit: Sony)

The upcoming launch of a redesigned "PS5 Slim" model will mark the first PlayStation to support an optional disc drive add-on for the shrinking number of players who want to stick with physical media . But players who want to use that drive to enjoy their PS5 discs offline must first perform a mandatory online check-in to pair the external disc drive with a specific console.

That's according to Call of Duty news site CharlieIntel, which posted early pictures of the packaging for a new PS5 Slim bundle that includes a disc drive and a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 . That packaging includes some tiny disclaimer text notifying players that an "Internet connection [is] required to pair Disc Drive and PS5 console upon setup."

The odd-sounding requirement may be part of an anti-piracy effort by Sony to ensure that only authorized, validated drives are connected to their hardware (preventing the connection of modified or generic drives that might aid in decrypting the data on those discs, for instance). In 2020, Wired tried swapping the stock disc drives included in two launch-era PS5 consoles, only to find that the new consoles didn't recognize the "unpaired" daughterboard on their "new" disc drives . Similar drive-pairing security is built into the drive assemblies for consoles going back to the Xbox 360 era at least.

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Enlarge / Horizon: Forbidden West .

Sony has announced a launch date for a new feature that will allow PlayStation Plus Premium members to stream PS5 games, just like they've been able to do with PS3 and PS4 games for a while.

The streaming service will roll out first in Japan on October 17, then in supported European countries (the full list is in Sony's blog post) on October 23, and finally in North America on October 30.

Not all games will be supported, but it sounds like quite a few will. Sony platform experience executive Hideaki Nishino writes in a blog post that streaming will be available "for supported PS5 digital titles within the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog and Game Trials, as well as supported titles in the PS5 game library that PlayStation Plus Premium members own."

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