Polygon

“People don't understand how close D&D and wrestling are,” said Brennan Lee Mulligan. And he’s speaking from an informed perspective, ushering Dimension 20 : Titan Takedown into the world this week.

In the new four-episode season of the long-running anthology actual play show, Mulligan hosts four WWE superstars — Xavier Woods, Kofi Kingston, Bayley, and Chelsea Green — to a game set in a professional-wrestling-themed reimagining of Greek mythology. And despite its brevity, the season has become a playground for wrestling-loving Dimension 20 veterans, who were welcomed into a suite of extra skits and bits to celebrate their own fandom.

The parallels between professional wrestling and actual play Dungeons & Dragons are easy to find, and when Polygon chatted with Mulligan via video call last week, we started with the obvious one. Did he feel like his entire career had come down to this: playing every heel?

“The Dungeon Master should just be called the All-Heel,” Mulligan said. “It is the heel of all heels; you play every heel, and it is your role to be big and blustery and then lose, and that is what the people want to see. It's a delight. I flew into it with all of the love and ardor I could muster.”

For more of Brennan’s thoughts on Titan Takedown , the kayfabe all around us, and the unexpected advantages of having new players in your actual play, read on.

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Polygon: Are you a wrestling fan from way back or is it something you 've been introduced to later in life or for the show?

Brennan Lee Mulligan: Later in life; I had the pleasure, the honor — I wish that everyone in the world could be so lucky as to be pals with the magnificent Danielle Radford [comedian and co-host of the Tights and Fights podcast]. Danielle is a wrestling and comedy super maven.

I have always been tangentially a fan of wrestling, as a lot of people are tangentially fans of D&D, where they're like, Oh, that looks fun, but no one has invited me specifically to participate. I don 't have an on-ramp. I'm not at a friend's house where they're watching it, my parents aren't watching it. So it's this thing that seems cool, but that I'm not getting drawn into.

Working in comedy, there are so many comedians that are huge wrestling fans. And Danielle took me by the hand — especially ramping up as this season was approaching — and went like, Here 's the historic matches, here's the lore, here's the jargon, here's the encyclopedia. She created this beautiful document for the season, came through and said, "Here's the matches you need to watch to understand these four players."

After years and years of being like, Oh, that seems cool, but I don 't see an organic way into participating in that, Danielle could not have thrown more of a royal red carpet out for me and all the D20 people that wanted to finally be involved. And it was a joy, a privilege, and an honor.

**I 've always been in a similar boat, but the appeal of wrestling clicked for me when I found out what kayfabe means. I thought, **Oh, it 's like the Muppets **. It 's a performance of a performance. **

Hey, listen, kayfabe is all around us. Anyone who has ever had to visit their grandma knows that you are not the same person everywhere, right? You go, [ soft, cheerful voice ] “Hi, Grandma. It's good to see you!” We present these masks; we present these sides of ourselves. Kayfabe is a really useful concept, and I love that it's entering common parlance. It's a useful term, especially in the age of social media [ mildly deranged voice ] where we are all performers, Susana, all of us are performers…

Oh god, interviews are already the most kayfabe space I occupy, this is a level of metatext I 'm not sure I'm capable of processing.

Dimension 20 has always included players of different levels of experience with Dungeons & Dragons. But recent seasons like Dungeons and Drag Queens and Titan Takedown have really leaned into new players as performers. What's in your playbook for introducing not just a player to a game they haven’t played, but a performer to this kind of performance they haven't done before?

The best thing I always say is: Don't worry about the rules. And I try to really remind people that I am a living encyclopedia. I'm like, "You should just step out into open air and I'll build a bridge underneath you. You can't go wrong. Don't be afraid." And also just trying to remind people that it's story first, game second.

What I mean by that is, it's not that the game doesn't matter — it's that people will literally come with a game mentality of being like, “Wait, so how do we win? Can we die? What's going on? What happens when we die, we lose the game?” And you're like, “No, you make another character…”

It's very funny, because it's not even a debate. It is story first. The game is story first. There's no lose condition, there's no win condition. The game ends when you're done telling your story, it's built into the bones of the thing. And so: Reminding people of that [is the first step]. But the truth is a lot of that "being a novice to the game" [stuff] is incredibly beneficial to the show. It's really helpful. It creates an on-ramp for people that can come and find a season really approachable.

It's so funny, we did Dungeons and Drag Queens , which was a lot of first-time players, and what's so funny is you think, Oh, this is going to be like a Reese 's Cup; your peanut butter got in my chocolate. Fans of drag and fans of D&D can cross-pollinate and find these other mediums and performers. It was so funny that a lot of people approached that season as people that were not drawn from either, but it was a good on-ramp to learn about both.

That you are novice to each other creates this really interesting opportunity to be able to jump into the beginning of something and go, Oh, they 're explaining the game to these performers and it's an easy on-ramp for me coming in. I think that with Titan Takedown , it was really great, because you see apex performers at the top of their mastery of this skillset, learning something new, but being absolutely so entertaining and charming that it's a wild ride while you're learning along with them.

Maybe this is a question wrongly asked, because all gaming groups are going to be different in their own ways, but were there any unexpected differences between introducing a group of drag performers to the game and introducing a group of wrestling performers to the game?

Yeah, I think I would say no. I'd say that they're just wonderful. They're just really wonderful.

Dungeons and Drag Queens just won Best Web Series at the Queerty Awards, onstage with Monét and Bob and our incredible producer, Ebony Hardin — who's the supervising producer for Dropout, but was also our day one production coordinator and producer going forward in Dimension 20. They're just phenomenal people.

You meet them on day one and you see these people that are quite famous, and they're just the most down to earth and funny and gregarious. Like Bob and Monét's rivalry, taking shots at each other, the cameras aren't [even] rolling, it's just delightful. And the same was true for these wrestlers, they were just the most warm and incredible [presences]. And again, to watch that facility and charm — I would say the cool thing was the storytelling.

If you're someone that's approaching this as a D&D fan that is seeing wrestlers for the first time, you might think of them as these obviously athletic, incredible performers. You see the big, larger-than-life persona. What I grokked right away was [that] their facility was storytelling. The understanding of setting something up and paying it off. The understanding of those turns, of moments where something shifts. There are storytelling moments in [ Titan Takedown ] that you really see how confident and skilled they are at bringing a character through an experience. I think that's going to be really gratifying for people to come in and see.

Titan Takedown _premiered on Dropout on April 2, with new episodes airing Wednesdays through April 23. _

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Spilled! creator Lente in the boat where she lives and makes games.

Push to Talk is a weekly newsletter about the business of making and marketing video games, written by games industry veteran and marketing director Ryan Rigney.Subscribe here for eclectic and spicy interviews and essays in your inbox every Friday.

Of the hundreds of indie games released on Steam each week, only a fortunate few become breakout hits.

Last week’s biggest winner was the viral drug-dealing simulator Schedule I . But it wasn’t the only game that managed to crack 1,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews in its first week. The other surprise was Spilled!, a bite-sized game about cleaning up waterways.

Spilled! puts you into a cute little solar-powered boat which you use to slurp up oil spills and gently, slowly , push floating cans and bottles into recycling bins, earning coins which unlock boat upgrades to speed up your task. It’s a meditative experience that you can finish in about an hour.

And you probably will finish it, because there’s something viscerally compelling about watching the game’s muddy brown waters gradually brighten to a clear blue as you putter around. Once each area is cleared, the next litter-strewn and oil-slicked environment beckons. So it goes for eight or nine turns of Spilled!’s game loop. And since it only costs $5.99, a solid 95% of Steam reviewers have given it a thumbs-up.

But maybe more compelling than the game’s price is its backstory. Spilled! was made primarily by a 25-year-old Dutch game developer called Lente, who lives on a boat which she purchased and renovated.

The sun shines on Spilled!

A few years ago, Lente made a YouTube channel and began logging the development of the game that ultimately became Spilled! At first, she was attempting to build the game entirely without a game engine, and though that didn’t pan out, her other efforts seemed charmed with preternaturally good fortune.

After making a Twitter account to try and make more game developer friends, the very first tweet Lente ever posted went semi-viral, earning her a following and a community. “That kinda jump started it I think,” Lente says. As buzz began building around her game, she says, “I started getting into events and showcases, and those really grew the wishlist count for Spilled! ”

After an early demo for the game did particularly well on Steam, Lente decided to make a Kickstarter campaign, which was successfully funded in the first 12 hours.

Lente’s streak of good fortune continued when a member of her Discord community reached out with an offer to rework Spilled’s 3D pixel art style. The artist, Starbi, had been following Lente’s efforts since her early YouTube days.

“He showed me some of his previous art,” Lente says, “and made a mockup for Spilled!. I quickly got very excited as he is truly, very talented with 3D pixel art.” Starbi joined the project officially, and the duo were able to show off the game’s visual update when Spilled! earned a promo slot in last June’s Wholesome Direct.

More wins followed. By August of last year, the game had over 50,000 wishlists on Steam. A few weeks before the launch, a very simple tweet showing Lente on her boat and a short clip of the game in action went viral on X, earning 26,000 likes. And so it was probably no surprise that, when Spilled! finally launched last Wednesday, it immediately rocketed to the top of Steam’s coveted “New & Trending” chart.

Fate smiles this brightly on very few indie games. Of the 18,239 games that released on Steam last year, only 445 earned over 1,000 reviews—a common milestone for indie success on Steam. Why does the universe deal so few games a winning hand?

Fate’s reasons are rarely clear—something Lente knows well. She’s had her fair share of inexplicably bad luck too.

A nautical childhood

Lente’s current boat isn’t the first she’s lived on. “My parents bought a ship 5 years before I was born,” she says. For her entire early childhood, that boat was home.

“I had the best time growing up there,” Lente says. “It was in the middle of nature, next to a small town. I was playing outside all the time. And when my parents had to run the laundry or something and turned on the generator, me and my brother sometimes played CD-ROM and flash games on the old laptop (it was chunky).”

When her parents would tie-off on land, Lente and her brother built treehouses and played in the water. “The world was our garden,” she says.

Lente’s family lived in a small municipality outside of Amsterdam, where the rules for boat-living weren’t always totally clear. “Usually you pay a yearly fee to put your boat somewhere,” she explains. “There are spots where you're allowed to officially live, but also plenty of harbors where it's not officially allowed—but they don't really care. And then another option would be to roam around a lot. You can stay in most spots in nature for three days in a row. Either by anchor, or by some specially made poles created for recreational boaters.”

Lente recalls one early story about another seafaring neighbor who ran afoul of the local authorities. Next to the spot where her family usually anchored, there was “a big wooden ship,” she says. “It was from a guy that used to do weddings and stuff on it. But unfortunately taxes caught up to him and he was not able to care for the ship anymore. Eventually the ship sank and slowly the masts would fall over too. It looked pretty cool. Me and my brother always called it the pirate ship.”

It was a charmed childhood, but around the time Lente turned 9 or 10, her own family began to run into trouble themselves. “The municipality started acting a little strange,” she says. “They said we'd have to move the ship because we didn't have a license to live there.” This was “basically correct,” because her parents had simply purchased the ship itself and began living in the location where the boat had long been anchored.

Eventually, Lente says, the municipality pushed her family out. Her parents were forced to sell the ship, and took out a mortgage for a small apartment in town so Lente and her brother could continue attending the same school they’d grown up in.

“That was important to them,” Lente says. “Talking about this gets me a little teary eyed.”

Her parents engaged in a long legal struggle with the municipality, and after five years they won: “Turns out the ship had been there so long, that they never should have kicked us out,” she says. “We got a replacement spot somewhere else, and my parents got a mortgage for a houseboat. But to this day, the new spot is only a temporary license, and we for instance can't sell the place if we wanted to.”

Why do these things happen? One day, some faceless small-town bureaucrat decides that the family that’s been living in a local river for 15 years has got to go.

From the perspective of a 9-year-old child, it must have felt incomprehensible. You have to leave your home and go live on land like all the other kids. Why?

A childhood reclaimed

Spoilers for the ending of Spilled! follow.

Throughout Spilled! you’ll occasionally see an unnamed antagonist trawling the waters—a sloppy oil tanker that leaves behind a mess wherever it goes.

Who’s steering this boat, and why are they doing this? Don’t they know that people live here? Animals and humans alike are the victims of the villainous boat’s antics. And you have to clean up behind it.

In the game’s final chapter, you’re forced to face off against a supersized oil tanker. Using your boat’s water cannon, you can flood its decks and sink it to the bottom of the bay.

You never learn more about your silent antagonist’s reasons. The inner workings of the machine are inscrutable. As the last vestige of its damage is undone and it disappears beneath the waves, you’re left to wonder why it was so determined to cause all that trouble.

In the end, the machine’s motivations don’t really matter. All you know is that, despite the damage it dealt, you have the tools available to do something about it. You can reclaim the water. And with effort, you can turn your fortunes around.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

At a glance, House House’s 2019 honking sensation Untitled Goose Game may not seem like the most obvious choice to write a book about. The game — essentially a stealth game where your job is to cause trouble — was a viral hit, but isn’t filled with extensive lore or complex mechanics that beg to be broken down over the course of hundreds of pages. So when Boss Fight Books announced a Goose Game book, I was curious to see what approach it would take.

As it turned out, not only there was a fascinating behind-the-scenes story, but the game ended up being a perfect entry point to talk about developer House House and the broader Australian game development community — which has struggled to make a name for itself over the years.

As part of an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. Check out the full list to read up on a Sky: Children of the Light book, a Street Fighter 2 documentary, and others. Below, Untitled Goose Game book author James O’Connor discusses the Australian game development scene, the power of coincidence, and page 171.

Polygon: On the surface, ** Untitled Goose Game** is a relatively simple game. What inspired you to write a book about it?

James O’Connor: The initial spark was, more than anything, a want to write about the Australian game development scene. I’d long been a fan of Boss Fight Books, and the more books they released, the more it felt to me like an opportunity was being missed if they didn’t publish any books about Australian game development — a topic I knew fairly well from my time working as a games journalist down here.

For decades, the country’s studios were best-known for their work with ports, handheld translations and licensed titles — Australian studios were cheap and had a reputation for getting good work done fast. Following the global financial crisis in the ’00s, a lot of the foreign investment that was fueling that work dried up, and studios began to shutter. What we ended up with was a wealth of experienced game developers who knew how to work efficiently, who had never been able to work on their own original ideas… and then along came the iPhone and the App Store. I get into this in more detail in the book!

I pitched a book on Untitled Goose Game for fairly practical reasons — I wanted to write about the shifts and changes across the local industry from 2010 to 2019, and Untitled Goose Game capped off that decade perfectly with a huge, strange, funny hit, one that had struck a huge cultural nerve. It’s just kind of a perfect object — a singular idea, realised brilliantly, a game that everyone immediately recognized the moment it was announced. I figured that digging down into how a game like this came to be would be interesting and fun. Luckily, I was right!

What did you learn about Australia’s development community when working on the book?

I’ve been in and around Australia’s game development community for a long time — as a journalist, and then eventually as a developer myself — but the thing that surprised me most was how many folks from across the local community intersect with the story of Untitled Goose Game ’s development. Working on this book felt a bit like how I imagine Stephen King feels when he writes a story and finds the characters from his other books suddenly walking across the page, except that most of it is set in Melbourne rather than Maine. Oh, here’s the guy I interviewed for a magazine ten years ago ; Ah, I didn’t know the person who used to run this festival was friends with the team ; Huh, this story has weird parallels to this other story I heard. That sort of thing.

I have long benefited from the generosity and support that flows through the local game development community across Australia, so it’s been nice being able to share some of that with readers.

What was the wildest anecdote or behind the scenes story you came across when reporting the book?

I will say that this isn’t necessarily a huge “wild anecdote” book, in that the stories that are really wild in here are more about how well everything went than how poorly. There isn’t a scene where a goose gets loose in the office and causes havoc, or where the publisher comes over for dinner and the four lads at House House have to try and disguise their ruined roast. The wild anecdotes are more along the lines of the perfect person to help them with the next part of the development process just sort of showed up one day.

Perhaps the anecdote that has stuck with me the most since writing this book is the one I lead with — the story of the day the four members of House House really cemented themselves as a team. Like many good stories, it starts with a misunderstanding, continues with a coincidence, and ends with them playing Sportsfriends. It’s this weird Sliding Doors moment — I honestly believe Untitled Goose Game would not have happened if things had gone even slightly differently on the day I describe in the introduction. There are a few such instances throughout the story, and it's interesting to think about.

What’s the best page in the book?

Page 171. Partly because it’s right near the end, so once someone gets there, they’ve enjoyed the book enough to make it all the way through (hopefully). But that page also does something a little fun that I won’t spoil.

I know I’ve just singled out the start of the book and the end of the book, but I recommend that people read all the other pages in between, too. Honk!!

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

Netflix’s gleeful horror-comedy Dead Talents Society wears a lot of its influences out in the open. Writer-director John Hsu talked with Polygon earlier this month about how YouTube streamers, ’90s Taiwanese pop music, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, and real Asian urban legends like “the little girl in red” helped inspire his manic movie about the capitalist grind of the afterlife. In Dead Talents Society , ghosts endlessly chase viral fame as haunting superstars, while one new ghost, The Rookie (Gingle Wang), deals with the humiliation of being an incompetent scarer.

During that interview, Hsu also mentioned that he’s an avid gamer, which has heavily influenced his career: He learned to script and edit while making World of Warcraft machinima videos and posting them on the AFK PL@YERS YouTube channel, and he went on to direct the 2019 film adaptation of the 2018 horror game Detention .

“Since I'm such a huge gamer — they realized it might be a good idea to have someone who's familiar with gaming culture make that film,” he told Polygon. “It’s not that I'm particularly interested in horror or history, but it's because of the fact that I'm a gamer that I got that job.”

With so many different references on the screen in Dead Talents Society , Polygon figured it was worth asking whether there were any game inspirations we missed in the movie. The answers were… really unexpected.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: Did any particular games affect your planning on ** Dead Talents Society** ? Or are there games you think people who love this movie should play?

John Hsu: There are so many of them. For example, Katamari Damacy.

I… would not have guessed that from this movie’s bloody, horror-driven humor.

It's not a direct influence, but I really enjoy the wackiness of the game. Every time when I'm nearing the end of the game, I get really emotional, because it's like — I can roll up something really big, and everything becomes one, to just one purpose. It's like Tokyo Godfathers or Little Miss Sunshine — [movie characters'] goals can be super stupid, but they're doing it anyway.

To me, Katamari Damacy is like, you're always rolling something and getting it bigger. It might not have any kind of meaning, but you do it again and again. You are making the ball bigger and bigger, but what's that for? And then you send it to the sky to become a star. It's kind of meaningless and also so meaningful at the same time.

**You 've **compared the horror elements of this movie to Sisyphus being doomed to eternally roll a rock up a hill . This sounds similar.

Yeah. We did a lot of research in terms of Albert Camus' work. Everything is meaningless, so you should just enjoy the process. That's the conclusion we have in the film.

In terms of other games, a lot of inspiration we had with Dead Talents Society came from indie games. For example, The Beginner 's Guide. It's an indie game from the author of The Stanley Parable. And it's about this game developer who made The Stanley Parable suffering from impostor syndrome. He found some kind of mystery — another game developer who's been anonymous for quite some time. He would upload random games that don't even sound fun to play, but it's like he was trying to say something, but it's so anonymous, no one knows who it is. So the protagonist, who is the game developer of Stanley Parable , is trying to find this guy.

And when the protagonist gets closer to that mysterious game developer, he's warned not to get even closer. Weird things happen, but at the end of the day, it's about, Why are we making stuff? Why are we creating stuff? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to connect to other people? Are we trying to be understood? Are we trying to be seen?

There's a scene in the game when your game gets super famous — there are a lot of people with cameras, taking photos of you, and their heads are blocked, saying "Press." It's a scene to describe unwanted attention. Because if you are creating something, in the beginning, at least, you must be creative because you thought it was fun. But at a certain point, when it's becoming your job, when you have an audience, when you have other people to satisfy, it gets more and more complicated.

And the creative process can be toxic sometimes, because we have to satisfy a lot of people, which is also impossible. And that influences your self-value and identity in certain ways. And that's the core of what we want to talk about in Dead Talents Society. So that game had a lot of influence as well. Me and my co-writer Tsai Kun-Lin both played it.

There's another game called Before Your Eyes. It's also an indie game, where when you blink, time will pass. So the camera is your eyes, and how you proceed the story. You get to see this protagonist's whole life. And sometimes you really don't want to miss the stuff you're seeing, but you do because you have to blink. That's the point of that game — time is fleeting. And what was actually the essence of your whole life after your death?

The protagonist is so similar to our protagonist. He had a musician mother, always pushing him to become another musician. And he was so ill as a child, so he thought he wouldn't satisfy his mother's expectations. So it's exactly like The Rookie in Dead Talents Society. When I played the game during the writing process, I was so surprised at how similar it was.

Dead Talents Society is quite personal to me, in terms of the Rookie story arc. I was forced to play piano when I was 10 or something. One of the songs I really had trouble practicing is a song that the character in Before Your Eyes is playing. So it's such a coincidence for me to realize that actually, there are a lot of people suffering from the same situation — either confusion about your self-value or about your identity when you're taking too much account of other people's opinions. It leads to impostor syndrome.

It fascinates me that none of these are horror games, that you were more influenced by various games ' philosophical elements. Are there any horror games that have been meaningful for you?

Oh yeah. Silent Hill 2. Definitely. I am a big fan of that series. I think the Silent Hill story is at its best in 2. When we were making Detention , we had a lot of influences and references from Silent Hill as well, because the game Detention also had a lot of influence from Silent Hill. I also quite enjoy Doki Doki Literature Club. I thought that was so clever — it's so meta. And using meta elements to scare people is the best.

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Dead Talents Society is streaming on Netflix now.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

All the best Assassin’s Creed games are about family.

The Ezio trilogy, long considered the peak of the series, is built on the tragic loss of Ezio’s family, and his fundamental loneliness. The game’s most iconic song — the one whose motif is colloquially known as “the Assassin’s Creed theme” — is titled “Ezio’s Family.” Assassin’s Creed Origins is the story of parents seeking vengeance after the death of their son. Likewise, the protagonist of Odyssey comes from a broken family: Alexios or Kassandra grows up orphaned after being literally dropped off a mountain by their father, who chooses loyalty to Sparta over protecting his children.

The latest game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Shadows , also revolves around family. Early on it takes the player through a long sequence where we see young ninja Naoe’s family life before — as always happens in this series — her world is upended by violence.

I’m not far enough into the game to see where Naoe’s story will (presumably!) intersect with the game’s second protagonist, Yasuke. The two start the narrative on opposite sides of Lord Oda Nobunaga’s warpath through 16th-century Japan, and they share equal real estate in the game’s marketing materials. But starting Assassin’s Creed Shadows reminded me of the first time that Ubisoft anchored an Assassin’s Creed game with dual protagonists — and how much I loved it.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate may have largely followed the franchise blueprint, but it did some things differently where it counted. I’m happy to call it my favorite game in the series. Here at Polygon it reviewed well, and Metacritic agrees. But its success was never guaranteed, and looking back on it now, I still think it’s kind of miraculous.

Syndicate’s bad timing

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate introduced the player to twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye. They’re young and opinionated, ready to make the leap from the boonies to bustling Victorian London.

It was the first time that Assassin’s Creed would have dual protagonists, and the first time a mainline Assassin’s Creed game would be co-headlined by a female character.

Assassin’s Creed 3 and its spinoffs had toyed with both of these concepts in limited ways. Assassin’s Creed 3 featured a prologue where the player inhabited Haytham Kenway, before swapping to his son Connor for the rest of the game. And the spinoff Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation is anchored by the slave-liberating Assassin Aveline de Grandpré — a genuinely cool, bold move even if the game was destined for the low-selling PlayStation Vita.

It was the right moment for Ubisoft to shake things up in a main series game, and also the worst. Syndicate came out in 2015, and it splash-landed right in the middle of a poisonous debate around playable female characters and the Gamergate harassment campaign.

At the time, Ubisoft was still putting out an Assassin’s Creed game basically every year. Although Syndicate would have been in development for years, it directly followed the much-maligned Assassin’s Creed Unity. Unityhad a rough launch from a technical perspective, but also got blowback when a developer told Polygon that a female character model was cut from the co-op mode, because of the additional work that creating it would entail.

In short, a lot of people were mad in a lot of different directions, and the pressure on Syndicate to do better was high.

Ubisoft also had to contend with a question that fewer and fewer people are asking these days: What about the lore? In previous games, the Animus that the Assassins use to relive history required a genetic link between the modern-day protagonist and their historical counterpart. By the time Unity rolled around, it was clear that this concept was holding the series back. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to ditch it: The tech gets better! Later versions of the Animus are advanced enough to simulate history just using the historical character’s DNA.

But in 2014 and 2015, players were still catching up with the new normal. The question of where and whether Arno Dorian, the protagonist of Unity , fit into Desmond Miles’ sprawling family tree was floated by fans on Reddit before that game’s release. The fact that Syndicate ’s Jacob and Evie are twins seems to gesture at this concern, too. Dual protagonists were possible — because their DNA was so similar. The lore could remain intact, and the historical timeline undisturbed.

(Science-heads, don’t bother trying to explain whether or not this justification actually makes sense — it truly doesn’t matter.)

Obviously, later games would hand-wave even more of the science. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey , the player can decide for themself whether Kassandra or Alexios is the mercenary that faces off against the Cult of Kosmos. Historical record be damned!

But Syndicate had a smaller sandbox to play in. And in that sandbox, it made some magic.

A tale of two twins

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate pioneered the model that Shadows now follows: two protagonists with different play styles and radically different personalities.

Jacob Frye is brash and bold — the kind of Assassin who runs into the burning orphanage without thinking ahead. He’s a brawler, and brass knuckles are his weapon of choice. Evie is a planner, and like Naoe, she is stealth incarnate. Her footsteps are lighter, and she carries a cane sword.

As in Shadows , Jacob and Evie are both introduced in gameplay missions upfront. But whereas Shadows then hides Yasuke behind hours of story progression, Syndicate immediately lets the player swap between Jacob and Evie in the open world of Victorian London.

Each character has their own story missions, however, and it’s here that Syndicate ’s narrower scope is really in its favor.

The twins have very different priorities. Evie is working with fellow Assassin Henry Green to find a Piece of Eden, a valuable artifact that must be kept from the Templars. Meanwhile, Jacob finds it more productive to simply assassinate the powerful Templars controlling the city.

The twins’ warring prerogatives bring them into conflict. In one mission, Jacob assassinates the governor of the Bank of England — a Templar who also made a habit of robbing the Bank of England. For Jacob, the solution is simple! See Templar, kill Templar.

Unfortunately this sends England spiraling toward a financial crisis.

It’s here that Evie has to step in, in a mission where the player recovers stolen currency printing plates. In this way, the two narratives are constantly counterbalancing each other. The player gets to wreak chaos as Jacob, but then see how his careless actions ripple out into the world, and make amends. It makes London feel like it’s really being shaped and driven by the twins’ (and the player’s) efforts.

Evie is frustrated by Jacob’s move fast and break things approach, and Jacob feels like Evie is wasting her time chasing McGuffins. They cross each other, clean up each other’s messes, and get on each other’s nerves — as siblings do.

And when inevitably Jacob’s and Evie’s goals are unified, it’s all the more satisfying.

All in the family

Like the rest of Assassin’s Creed’s orphaned and tormented heroes, Jacob and Evie have parental baggage. Their story begins shortly after their father, the Assassin who trained them, dies. It’s not a dramatic death and there’s no one to blame, except maybe Victorian environmental standards: Ethan Frye dies of pleurisy, a painful lung disease.

The game begins when these two young, ambitious Assassins are set loose on the world for the first time. They’re discovering who they are without the guiding — and often critical — hand of their father.

The twins’ relationship with Ethan underlines all of their conflicts. Evie has always been the golden child who excelled under Ethan’s tutelage and took his philosophy to heart. Jacob chafed at the restrictions and wants to do things his own way.

But then, something very special happens.

[ Ed. note: This rest of this story contains spoilers for the ending of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and the Jack the Ripper DLC.]

Unlike so many Assassin’s Creed games that came before it, Syndicate is a happy story.

Jacob and Evie grow through their differences and learn to work together. Evie and Henry Green fall in love. They all get knighted by Queen Victoria. And everybody lives! Instead of descending into maudlin tragedy, Syndicate is about learning to love and live with the family that you have — even if you don’t always agree with them.

[Content truncated due to length...]

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March is finally behind us, and with its passing comes the arrival of spring and all its splendors! There’s a ton of exciting new releases to catch in theaters this month, from the returns of major directors, like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, to escapist genre fare like The Accountant 2 and The Legend of Ochi.

Looking for something to watch from the comfort of your own home? Don’t worry, we got you. This month’s selection of the best films available on streaming include Steve McQueen’s underrated heist thriller starring Viola Davis, a bonafide classic from Michael Mann, a stirring period romance, and much more.

Here are the best movies new to streaming services you should watch this month!

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Editor’s Pick

Widows

Where to watch: Hulu **
Genre:** Heist thriller **
Director:** Steve McQueen **
Cast:** Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki

Modern thrillers don’t get much better than 2018’s Widows. The story follows Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis), the widow of a famous bank robber. After her husband’s death, Veronica gets pushed into pulling a heist of her own to pay back Jamal (Bryan Tyree Henry), the crime boss that her husband stole from in his last heist.

Director Steve McQueen ( 12 Years a Slave ), manages to fill every moment of the movie with palpable tension, but it’s the outstanding cast, which also includes Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, and Daniel Kaluuya, who really make this movie shine. Every single actor here is doing some of the best work they’ve ever done, including one of the most terrifying performances in modern memory from Kaluuya. While this movie didn’t make a massive splash when it was released, it’s absolutely a modern crime classic, and one worth revisiting. — Austen Goslin

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New on Netflix

Heat

Genre: Heist thriller **
Director:** Michael Mann **
Cast:** Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer

It’s never a bad time to rewatch Michael Mann’s cops-and-criminals heist classic Heat , but right now is a particularly great time. After all, Netflix also has both Den of Thieves movies, which make for a perfect pairing with Heat , and Mann himself apparently just turned in his script for Heat 2, which will follow the plot of the novel he released in 2022 and act as both a prequel and sequel to his 1995 film. In much sadder news, the film also includes a tremendous performance by Val Kilmer, who passed away this week.

All of that preamble aside though, Heat remains an absolute banger and one of the best heist movies ever made. While the sprawling story takes on half a dozen or so subplots, and tons of different characters, the heart of Heat is the constant chess match between master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), the expert police detective who’s chasing him. While many movies have tried to replicate this cat-and-mouse game since Heat was first released, no other movie has ever nailed it quite like the original. — AG

New on Hulu

Sexy Beast

Genre: Black comedy **
Director:** Jonathan Glazer **
Cast:** Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane

Prior to winning an Oscar for his historical drama The Zone of Interest , Jonathan Glazer cut his teeth as a music video, directing some of the most visually striking short films for idiosyncratic artists like Radiohead, Apex Twin, and Jamiroquai. His 2000 feature directorial debut, Sexy Beas t, feels the most indebted to his previous life as a commercial director out of all his films, thanks in no small part to its pulsing electronic score composed by UK triphop outfit Unkle.

Ray Winstone stars as Gary "Gal" Dove, an ex-criminal happily retired in the South of Spain, living a life of luxury and leisure off the fruit of his ill-gotten gains. When Gal is visited by Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a sociopathic former acquaintance, his once-placid life is completely upended, forcing him to resort to desperate measures in order to finally leave his old life behind. While Winstone is technically the lead, it's Kingsley that steals the spotlight as Don with his caustic rapid-fire invective and intimidating demeanor. Throw in a memorable supporting performance by Ian McShane as an eagle-eyed London crime boss, and you have a nail-biting crime thriller with a serious psychological bent. — Toussaint Egan

New on Max

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Genre: Historical romantic drama **
Director:** Céline Sciamma **
Cast:** Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel

Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film is one of the most beautiful and bittersweet love stories ever committed to film, a sapphic romance set against the backdrop of 18th century France. Having been commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), the soon-to-be wife of a wealthy dignitary, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject unexpectedly fall in love, all the while knowing that their love cannot be — nor last forever. With beautiful cinematography, an exquisite pair of leading performances, and an ending certain to clench at your heartstrings, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an unambiguous masterpiece. —TE

New on Prime Video

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Genre: Romantic fantasy **
Director:** George Miller **
Cast:** Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba

To say it plainly, Three Thousand Years of Longing was not the film most audiences had in mind for George Miller’s operatic post-apocalyptic thriller Mad Max: Fury Road. It was a damn good movie, rich with mesmerizing imagery and an affecting on-screen dynamic between a demure narratologist (Tilda Swinton) and the haughty Djinn (Idris Elba) she unwittingly unleashed from a flask in Istanbul. I wholly believe that time will be kind to this film, by why miss an opportunity to experience it now? If you love Miller’s work, you’ll undoubtedly find something to love here. —TE

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A few minutes into my first look at The Midnight Walk , I thought to myself, Wait, is this actually the game? Not a cutscene? What I was watching looked like a gorgeous stop-motion animated short film, but I soon realized the developers from MoonHood Studios were showing me real-time game footage.

The Midnight Walk looks so much like a stop-motion film, a la Phil Tippett’s Mad God or old Tool videos, in part because the game’s characters, monsters, and environments are composed of actual physical materials. Klaus Lyngeled of MoonHood says the studio sculpted some 700 objects, 3D-scanned them in, and turned them into polygonal models. Characters are animated with a stop-motion stutter and the camera has a shallow depth of field to complete the look.

Lyngeled and writer Olov Redmalm describe their first-person, narrative-driven puzzle game as a “cozy horror adventure” full of eccentric weirdos and friendly monsters. The story spans multiple chapters of fairy tales, but there’s a consistent theme among them: warmth, contrast, and bringing light back into a dark world.

The Midnight Walk starts with the game’s main character, the Burnt One, digging themselves out of a grave and repairing their body. As they take their journey through the titular highway the Midnight Walk, they’re joined by a charming and goofy little creature known as Potboy. This guide and companion has a little brazier on its head; using Potboy’s flame and a series of matches, players light torches to bring light to the Midnight Walk and battle enemies.

There’s some puzzle-solving and stealth throughout the game, and even a button dedicated to closing your eyes to just… listening. (MoonHood promises binaural audio and suggests that players experience The Midnight Walk while wearing headphones.) There’s even some “gunplay” — the developers showed the Burnt One acquiring a weapon that shoots lit matches, giving the player extended range to battle monsters and solve puzzles.

While much of The Midnight Walk lives up to its “cozy” descriptor, largely thanks to Potboy, there’s some real horrific-looking stuff in here too. Every monster and boss is some variation on a twisted freak: There are scurrying cyclopean mutants, giant spider-like terrors, leathery weirdos with their eyes sewn shut, and angry-looking slug creatures with rage issues.

The developer’s listed inspirations ( Over the Garden Wall , The Nightmare Before Christmas , David Lynch, Half-Life 2 ) were apparent throughout my eyes-on preview, but the combination of influences and craft on display makes The Midnight Walk feel distinct from the projects that came before it. Suffice it to say, I’m looking forward to MoonHood’s new game, something that wasn’t really on my radar until last week.

Fortunately, the wait to play will be short. The Midnight Walk is coming to PlayStation 5 (with PlayStation VR2 support) and Windows PC via Steam on May 8.

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In a YouTube video Friday, Dropout.tv CEO Sam Reich announced plans to increase the cost of subscriptions to the streaming service starting May 7. Monthly subscription costs will go from $5.99 to $6.99, while annual subscriptions will go from $59.99 to $69.99. However, anyone with a current Dropout subscription will remain locked into the legacy price until they change or cancel their subscription. This means if you want to secure the lowest possible price for your Dropout subscription, you should commit to an annual plan before May 7. It’s also worth noting that new subscribers can still save 20% on annual plans, and additional details have thankfully been spelled out in an FAQ on Dropout if you need more information.

This is the first time Dropout has increased its price since January 2022, and reflects a variety of factors like higher production values and inflation in addition to providing adequate compensation for staff and production teams. Reich says in the video, “To allow us to continue to operate in a healthy, sustainable way, we think that raising prices every few years to keep up with costs and inflation makes sense, but we still want to reward existing subscribers for their loyalty.”

Even with this modest price increase, Dropout.tv is still one of the best values in streaming with an awesome spread of content from the immensely popular actual play series Dimension 20 , to Reich’s own game show spinoff Game Changer , and more.

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Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

This week, The Monkey , the new black comedy horror thriller from director Osgood Perkins ( Longlegs ), screeches and bangs its way onto VOD. That’s not all that’s new to rent and purchase this week, as Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag , starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, also comes to VOD, along with Naoko Yamada’s The Colors Within , Paddington in Peru , and more. Plus, the new buddy comedy One of Them Days , starring Keke Palmer and SZA, comes to streaming on Netflix.

Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!

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New on Netflix

One of Them Days

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Genre: Buddy comedy
Run time: 1h 37m
Director: Lawrence Lamont
Cast: Keke Palmer, SZA, Katt Williams

SZA and Keke Palmer star in this buddy comedy in which they play two best friends who have one day to find the $1,500 they need for rent, because one of their boyfriends blew through all their cash. Hilarity and hijinks ensue, as the two desperately try to come up with the cash, resorting to taking out sketchy loans, donating plasma, and climbing up a telephone pole to retrieve a pair of Jordans.

New on Max

Y2K

Where to watch: Available to stream on Max

Genre: Horror comedy **
Run time:** 1h 31m
Director: Kyle Mooney **
Cast:** Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison

Remember when everyone thought the year 2000 would cause a bunch of electronics errors? Well, in Kyle Mooney’s Y2K , the error isn’t so much an error as it is electronic devices coming to life and trying to enslave humanity. Aren’t we glad that that didn’t happen IRL? There are some brutal and hilarious deaths, including a kill by Tamagotchi, a very 2000 soundtrack, and one great cameo.

New on Shudder

825 Forest Road

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

Genre: Horror **
Run time:** 1h 41m **
Director:** Stephen Cognetti
Cast: Lorenzo Beronilla, Brian Anthony Wilson, Elizabeth Vermilyea

Director Stephen Cognetti ( Hell House LLC ) is back with a new supernatural horror thriller. After a grisly family tragedy, Chuck Wilson (Joe Falcone) moves to the town of Ashland Falls with his wife (Elizabeth Vermilyea) and sister (Kathryn Miller) in hopes of starting a new life. Upon moving into their new home, however, the family finds themselves stalked by a malevolent presence whose influence runs deep throughout the town’s history.

New to rent

Black Bag

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Spy thriller
Run time: 1h 33m
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela

Steven Soderbergh returns for his second feature film of 2025, this time a sultry spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as a happily married couple of British intelligence officers. When a top-secret malware program is stolen, Kathryn (Blanchett) is implicated and George (Fassbender) is secretly tasked with investigating her. As the plot unfolds, the couple is faced with the challenge of whether or not they can trust each other in a field where nearly everyone knows how to lie.

The Colors Within

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Drama **
Run time:** 1h 41m **
Director:** Naoko Yamada **
Cast:** Akari Takaishi, Sayu Suzukawa, Taisei Kido

In this quiet, contemplative movie from K-On! and Sound! Euphonium director Naoko Yamada, three lonely teenagers start a band. It’s less about a love for music and more about the three of them finding kindred spirits with each other. The main character has a form of synesthesia where she sees particular emotions and people as colors. The splashes of gorgeous watercolor hues add some beautiful emotional impact to the otherwise grounded visuals.

From our review:

What makes _The Colors Within _work so well is how the naturalistic animation combined with the specific set-pieces and situations create such a distinct feeling and atmosphere. There are just so many gorgeous, evocative moments where the movie lingers: Kimi’s forlorn reflection in a set of Newton balls; the slightly fuzzy city lights behind Totsuko’s hand as she waves goodbye to Kimi; Rui’s sneakers on the snow-covered steps of the church, shifting as he calls his mother. All the small details contribute to a feeling of soft loneliness that slowly lessens as the characters grow closer and closer.

The Last Stop in Yuma County

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Neo-Western thriller **
Run time:** 1h 30m **
Director:** Francis Galluppi **
Cast:** Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Sierra McCormick

This neo-Western crime thriller centers on a travelling knife salesman who unwittingly finds himself in an unconventional hostage situation after being stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop. Held at gunpoint by two ruthless bank robbers, both he and the rest stop’s waitress (Jocelin Donahue) must find a way to escape without arousing the robbers’ suspicions, all the while carrying on a normal workday like nothing’s happened. Things only get weirder and worse from there.

The Monkey

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Horror comedy **
Run time:** 1h 38m **
Director:** Osgood Perkins **
Cast:** Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery

Coming off the strength of last year’s breakout horror thriller Longlegs , director Osgood Perkins is back with a new black comedy horror based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story. The Monkey stars Theo James ( Divergent) as Hal and Bill, identical twins who have to find a way to destroy a cursed cymbal-banging monkey toy with the power to kill anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path.

As Polygon’s editor-in-chief Chris Plante puts it:

The Monkey , for all of the familiar trappings, isn’t just another horror-tinged distraction. As the kills become gnarlier — and more, how do I put this?… impressive? — it becomes clear that Perkins is using a familiar skeleton to support something muscular and human. He once again borrows from the works of some of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Not the ones that get added to the Criterion Collection, but those you see get loving 4K discs from boutique brands like Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome.

Opus

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Psychological thriller **
Run time:** 1h 44m **
Director:** Mark Anthony Green **
Cast:** Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis

Ayo Edebiri ( Bottoms ) stars in this psychological horror thriller as Ariel Ecton, a young music journalist who is invited to the remote compound of a reclusive pop star (John Malkovich) who has been unseen for the past 30 years. What at first seems a once-in-a-lifetime interview opportunity quickly morphs into a nightmarish scenario as Ariel finds herself surrounded by cultish sycophants, intoxicated colleagues, and a nefarious idol with a lot more than music on his mind.

Paddington in Peru

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Adventure **
Run time:** 1h 46m **
Director:** Dougal Wilson **
Cast:** Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer

[Content truncated due to length...]

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In its latest little widget that shows up when searching for a specific game-related term, Google has now added… filling out a complete* Pokédex.

*For the first 151 Pokémon, at least.

Any mobile user who searches for one of those original Pokémon will find a Poké Ball button that they can tap to catch that Pokémon, complete with a familiar animation. As long as they’re logged in, their progress toward completing a Google-based Pokédex will be recorded, and they’ll be prompted with a “Who’s that Pokémon?”-style clue pointing to any Pokémon they haven’t caught yet.

That really seems to be it — no wading through tall grass, just searching for the names of all 151 original Pokémon and tapping the Poké Ball. Google’s news release also says that Legendary or Mythical Pokémon will require Master Balls to catch (traditional), which can be earned by catching regular Pokémon. And that “to win, users must catch all 151 original Pokemon characters.” What you get for winning was not revealed, so all we can assume is that it will include satisfying your instinct for completing things.

Google’s news release cited no particular reason for implementing a Pokémon-catching game at this particular point in time, except to say that “searches for ‘pokemon card’ reached an all-time high in the US” this February. The search engine’s new Pokédex widget is only available on mobile, and requires that you be logged into a Google account in order to save your progress.

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