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2025-12-12 09:40:04

Coven of the Chicken Foot has a lot of things going for it already, in my book. It stars a hero rarely seen in video games, an elderly woman, and it has gorgeous storybook-style art in a lush fantasy setting. It’s a single-player puzzle platformer, it relies on wordless storytelling and the woman, a witch named Gertie, travels with a creepy-cute companion. Plus, Gertie has chicken feet. I love her little chicken feet.

Coven of the Chicken Foot is the first game from Wildflower Interactive, the independent studio founded by Naughty Dog veteran Bruce Straley. The game is coming to Steam and it’s available to wishlist now, though there’s no firm release date. The first trailer for Coven of the Chicken Foot premiered at The Game Awards 2025, showing Gertie and her friend traveling together through caves, forests and temples.

Gertie is on a quest to prove herself to the local coven by standing up to the self-appointed, prideful heroes of the land. She doesn’t have a sword or a dodgeroll, and instead has to figure out how to work with her strange friend to survive. Her companion develops unique behaviors based on individual play styles, shaping how Gertie gets around.

Straley left Naughty Dog in 2017 after almost 20 years with the studio, where he directed The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. He announced Wildflower Interactive in July 2022 with a brief YouTube message, saying, “In 2017 I left the industry not sure if I wanted to make games anymore. But the longer I was away, I kept thinking about this medium, and everything yet to be done and everything I wanted to do still. And this idea kept following me. So I grabbed some friends and we started prototyping.”

This naturally led to the formation of a studio, Straley explained.

“We have to do it the right way,” he said in the video. “It has to be inclusive, equitable and collaborative, full of big-hearted people that want to grow both professionally and personally. The culture needs to be as iterative as the way we make games.”

Wildflower Interactive

Today Wildflower Interactive has 16 employees from AAA and smaller-scale backgrounds, according to its website. Its mission statement reads as follows:

“We’re making ‘small-ish,’ creatively-charged, uniquely-stylized games that explore the possibilities of our medium. And we’re building a small, open-hearted team of creators that want to improve their skills and still lead a good life outside of work. People that want to hone their craft, have a say in the process, feel respected for their contributions, and be a part of the evolution of this awesome medium.”

I’m not going to say the studio’s direct and repeated emphasis on work-life balance, diversity and compassion is a response to the soulless capitalistic grind built into the AAA development complex, but I’m not going to not say that, either.

2025-12-12 09:29:13

The Game Awards kicked off with a bang, showing the world premiere of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. It's a brand new action role-playing game that will be directed by Casey Hudson, who previously headed up several notable BioWare games you probably know like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic.

There’s not much to go on in the trailer, but the game simply existing is a pretty great surprise and this cinematic trailer sure looks shiny. Hudson is working with Arcanaut Studios on this project, which is described as “an epic interactive adventure across a galaxy on the brink of rebirth where every decision shapes your path towards light or darkness.” Which kind of sounds like Star Wars crossed with Mass Effect, and I am personally very excited for that combo.

2025-12-12 09:08:26

Capcom’s long, long-delayed sci-fi shooter Pragmata finally has a release date. It’s headed your way on April 24, 2026 on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and — as Capcom confirmed in a trailer at The Game Awards — Nintendo Switch 2. You don’t have to wait another four months to try it out, though. A gameplay demo is out now on Steam. It will be available for consoles at a later date.

Pragmata first emerged all the way back in 2020 and Capcom initially planned to release it in 2022. After multiple delays, the game will arrive four years later than the company anticipated.

This is the first entry in a new franchise from Capcom, so taking extra time to get things right is not exactly a bad idea. Pragmata, which is set in a dystopian near-future, features the dual protagonists of Hugh Williams (a heavily armored fella) and Diana (an android with special powers). The two have to work together if they want to escape from a lunar research station that’s filled with malevolent robots. To defeat these clankers, Diana has to hack them to disable their defense systems and make a weak point available for Hugh to attack.

2025-12-12 08:56:34

A lot of trailers drop during The Game Awards, but the comedy of Bradley the Badger stood out from the pack. The conceit is similar to Wreck-It Ralph. Bradley, the protagonist of a fictional platforming series, is suddenly transported into the worlds of other unfinished video games; the trailer shows a badger-ified Bloodborne, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us. He also has access to a kit of dev tools that let him modify these incomplete projects, getting a taste of making a game. As the trailer ends, Bradley briefly crosses into the real world and comes face to face with an actual game developer. This looks like it will be a funny and very meta game. Astro Bot made that combo work brilliantly, so here's hoping Bradley the Badger does too. 

"Bradley is part love letter to videogames and part satire of them," said Christian Cantamessa, co-founder of Day 4 Night Studios. "Games are an art form and this is a story inspired by our adventures making them." Cantamessa and fellow co-founder Davide Soliani have some big credits on their resumes, including Red Dead Redemption, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The titular badger is voiced by Evan Peters, who has been in the recent X-Men movies as well as Tron: Ares.

The team is planning to release the game on Steam, with consoles possibly to follow, but no timeline has been given yet.

2025-12-12 07:55:09

Apple has clawed back a bit of ground in its legal fight with Epic Games that could have wide-reaching consequences for all app developers. Today, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals mostly upheld a previous contempt ruling regarding fees Apple levied on third-party payment systems. However, the judges did decide to reverse the order that Apple cannot charge any commissions on those external payments, which was one of the company's main arguments in this ongoing debate.   

To catch you up, US Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers initially ruled in 2021 that Apple must allow third-party payment systems, although her decision fell shy of calling the tech company's control over the App Store a monopoly. In May 2025, she ruled that Apple's 27 percent commission on those outside payments violated her previous order. Apple responded with an emergency motion to appeal that finding. 

Epic Games had taken its smash hit Fortnite off both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store while it was in court arguing these cases. Fortnite returned to iOS in the spring and just arrived back on Android devices today.

2025-12-12 05:57:12

Amazon's plan to offer AI-generated recaps of Prime Video shows isn't off to a great start. The company's recap of the first season of Fallout features multiple errors, GamesRadar+ writes, including basic facts about the plot of the show.

You can watch the recap yourself in the "Extras" section of Amazon's Fallout season two listing in Prime Video. Besides being somewhat dry, the AI-generated recap incorrectly identifies the time period of the show's Los Angeles-set flashbacks as being the 1950s, when they're actually 2077 (the Fallout franchise is set in an alternate history that diverged from our real one after 1945). As Gizmodo notes, the recap also seems to misunderstand the ending of the first season, which sets up season two's partnership between vault dweller Lucy and The Ghoul, an irradiated wastelander with a personal connection to the mystery at the heart of the first season.

While the recap suggests Amazon's AI system can successfully combine clips, music and dialogue into a coherent video, it apparently lacks an understanding of the details. The inaccuracies in this recap won't prevent anyone from enjoying the second season of the show, but they don't exactly inspire confidence in Amazon's tool either. It also seems like a problem that could have been easily solved by having a human employee who's watched the show review the video before it was uploaded.

Unfortunately, Amazon's lack of AI quality control extends beyond recaps of its shows and into the dubs for the shows themselves. The company pulled AI-generated voiceover tracks for Banana Fish and other anime because of how bad they sounded earlier this week. It wouldn't be surprising if this recap gets pulled, corrected and re-uploaded, too. As Amazon adds more AI-generated content to its platform, users are bound to discover more ways it comes up short. The company's audience is too big, and AI is apparently still too unreliable for it to be avoided.