In this episode of New Gameplay Today, Kyle and Marcus take a look at Planet of Lana II, the sequel to 2023's gorgeous sci-fi puzzle adventure. The art seems like it's still on point, but how does the gameplay stand up? Check out our immediate takeaways on its latest demo here.

Supermassive Games’ next Dark Pictures Anthology game, Directive 8020, has a new launch date after being previously delayed out of 2025. You can look for the new sci-fi horror adventure on May 12.

Directive 8020 is Supermassive’s first sci-fi story and centers on the stranded crew of a crashed colony ship on planet Tau Ceti f. The game stars the ship’s pilot, Briana Young, played by actress Lashana Lynch (Bob Marley: One Love, The Woman King), who must decide who among her team to trust as an alien organism capable of perfectly mimicking any crewmate infiltrates the ship. A new trailer shows off the game's action and drama.

Like previous Supermassive titles such as The Quarry and Until Dawn, Directive 8020 is a cinematic, choice-driven adventure where your decisions steer the plot in various directions and can affect who survives and who perishes. However, Directive 8020 is a more active experience, with players using stealth to sneak around enemies in fully explorable environments. Directive 8020 can be played solo or with friends in five-player couch co-op. Online multiplayer will arrive as a free update post-launch.

Directive 8020 also has a new feature called Turning Points, which allows players to rewind and revisit key decisions. This makes it easier to keep favorite characters alive should they perish, view different outcomes without replaying the entire game, and collect missed achievements. Those looking for a more hardcore experience can play Survivor Mode, which presents the story with pure permadeath and no re-dos.

Directive 8020 was originally scheduled to launch on October 2, 2025, but was delayed due to layoffs at Supermassive. The game will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on May 12. 

In this episode of New Gameplay Today, we check out Replaced, an upcoming 2.5D cinematic action platformer wherein you control a computer stuck in a human body. Editors Kyle Hilliard and Marcus Stewart liken it to Playdead's Inside and Limbo, with a simple yet satisfying combat system reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum. 

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Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Grasshopper Manufacture
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Release: February 11, 2026
Rating: Mature

Suda51’s role on Romeo is a Dead Man is producer, but his fingerprints and tone are all over the journey. The story follows space and time-travelling FBI agents who drink cream soda (hold the soda) and battle villains in violent displays with the help of zombies grown in a spaceship garden. The premise is ridiculous and fun, and it looks and feels like a different game every few minutes thanks to all its disparate art directions. I have my annoyances with Romeo is a Dead Man and its insistence on never getting too comfortable with any single idea, but the total package is one of my favorites from developer Grasshopper Manufacture. And it succeeds without many of the asterisks that typically accompany a game from one of gaming’s most enduring auteurs.

The plot of Romeo is a Dead Man is weird but worthwhile. The titular Romeo is half-dead as a result of an early incident (a fact that his superiors are constantly forgetting) and gets recruited to a space-time police force to help them pursue evil versions of Juliet, an amnesiac woman Romeo had the misfortune of falling in love with. I love the idea of a doomed romance across space and time (the main characters' names are not an accident), but the broader execution didn’t fully pull me in. I wasn’t emotionally invested in the larger plot. Instead, it was the little moments that engaged me, like working with a zombie sniper to pursue a time-travelling villain, or listening to Romeo’s sister tell a story that the game warned me was going to take a while. The characters, each unique and realized, are the game’s strength, and spending time with them, either in cutscenes, conversations, or on our time-travel spaceship, is a joy.

With the dense, tongue-in-cheek setup established, the actual gameplay involves fighting zombies and bosses with a collection of laser swords and guns. The basic action is simple, but it makes efforts to ensure you are doing more than just repeating a simple combo. Larger enemies have weak points that must be shot, and executing a frequent special move to restore health makes combat a fun game of timing. I rarely felt overwhelmed by the action, which is how I like it. The fun of Romeo is a Dead Man is time-traveling to different eras to fight and learn more about the people helping you on your mission, not necessarily battling zombies, but that part is good, too.

 

Between your time-travel assassination missions, you hang out on your spaceship, which is presented in a completely different, pixelated art style. The personalities on board are big, and there are minigames for cooking health-restoring curries and a garden where you can grow Bastards, zombies you can use during battle to restore health, or fire lasers at your enemies, among dozens of other abilities. Growing and combining the Bastards is a fun (and weird) side activity that pays off in the combat moments when the action gets too intense.

One of my favorite elements of Romeo is a Dead Man, however, is upgrading Romeo. You collect currency to spend on improving weapons, but to upgrade Romeo himself involves navigating a large Pac-Man-inspired maze. Across the maze are upgrades like improved reload time (a surprisingly worthwhile improvement) and more health, among others, and you exchange your experience for passage in the maze. I got surprisingly invested in charting my path to acquire the specific advancements I wanted. It’s a unique and rewarding system for improving your character, and I would not be mad to see other games, even outside of Grasshopper, adopt it.

Romeo is a Dead Man continues the bizarre, violent, and unexpectedly thoughtful style of game Suda51 has made a career out of creating, or in this case, shepherding. Looking at Grasshopper’s gameography, this one lives near the top of the ordered list for me. I was left wanting more from the love story incidentally promised by the protagonist’s names, but I was eager to keep playing to make Romeo stronger, see where I was going next, and learn more about the colorful cast of characters.

Score: 8.25

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Reviewed on: PC
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Wildlight Entertainment
Developer: Wildlight Entertainment
Release: January 26, 2026
Rating: Teen

Not every game clicks instantly. Highguard was released with little prior fanfare and even less explanation of its novel systems; my early games left me confused and frustrated. But with each match I played, I warmed to the flow of the action, the feel of movement and weapons, and the unique playstyle developer Wildlight Entertainment is trying to introduce. The game has a long way to go to be at its best, but for competitive shooter players looking for a departure from expectation, there’s good reason to be hopeful about Highguard’s future.

Highguard drops players into an unusual magical world of high fantasy, but also populates that world with assault rifles and rocket launchers. The towering ruins and castles that dot the maps are impressive, the characters are all visually striking, and the in-game dialogue alludes to what might be a cool fiction. Unfortunately, the lack of in-game lore explanation or exposition left me feeling rudderless and at a loss. Is that person a princess? Why are we fighting each other? How is it that we can summon massive siege towers by slamming a sword into a wall? Wildlight presents a surprising mix of genre influences, but without meaningful, cohesive storytelling, the world is hard to embrace.

Thankfully, Highguard’s gameplay fares much better. Wildlight’s background as prior developers of Apex Legends shines through; tight, fast-moving gunplay feels tense and precision-focused. Traversal of the world is great fun, especially the incredibly cool summonable mounts that let you gallop at high speeds across rock and meadow.

Likewise, Highguard’s core raid game mode takes several matches to grasp, but it can be deeply enjoyable once you get the swing of things. Borrowing from the likes of Capture-the-Flag, Domination, and Search and Destroy modes in other games, raids emerge as a wholly distinct experience. Players fortify a home fort, set out across the map to scavenge resources, retrieve a relic that can break the enemy fort’s shields, and then infiltrate and detonate bombs to bring them down. The clever push and pull provides points for the shield break and detonations, but also for things like successful defense runs or full enemy team wipes during overtime sequences.

 

At its best, the whole raid loop can be intense and fast-paced. Matches can end quickly if one team gets lucky or is especially well-coordinated, but many matches can run 20 or 30 minutes, as multiple raids bounce back and forth for each team, and the power level of available guns and upgrades on the field continually escalates. I like many of the characters, but they don’t feel especially balanced at this stage, with a few of them essentially required to be on a team for a good shot at victory.

Highguard also suffers badly from a lack of variety. Even after the recent addition of a 5v5 option that gives matches a larger scope (but a lesser tactical feel), after a couple of dozen hours, I was definitely feeling the repetition. The early match loop, in particular, is tiresome to repeat. And while I sympathize with the desire to have familiar weapon archetypes that a player can recognize at sight as one scavenges, I’m already feeling like I want more nuance and uniqueness from the firearms. They feel good to use, but don’t inspire excitement.

Having given the game time to settle before offering a full critique, it’s clear that Wildlight has the chops to iterate quickly and respond thoughtfully to community feedback. Even in the scant weeks after launch, the arrival of a new season, a ranked mode, tweaks to match-end stats reporting, and a new playable Warden all speak to big things ahead. However, I have to review the game in front of me – not what it might be in the future – and at this stage, Highguard feels like it needs more variety in weapons and play experiences, increased fleshing out of its in-game world, and some ongoing efforts to find balanced matches. Even acknowledging all that, here in the launch window, Highguard already offers moments of satisfying competition; the best compliment I can give it is that in a time when there’s no shortage of great multiplayer fare to try out, I plan to continue to play in the weeks and months ahead, even long after I’m done sharing this review.

Score: 7.5

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